A Game of Truth
by daphnaea
Summary: Then it hit him. The thing Lisbon most wanted from him was honesty. She wanted to be in on the gag, to understand where he was coming from and why he did the things he did. And she was right. If he couldn't give that to her, he had no business pursuing her. So he would tell her the truth, so much of it that she couldn't help but see him differently - see them differently.
1. Chapter 1 (Prologue)

**Author's Note: **This story both starts and goes AU at the end of S6E7 (The Great Red Dragon).

* * *

I. The End

The CBI was an overturned ants' nest of activity, the invading army of FBI agents apparently planning to unravel the Blake Association through sheer strength of numbers. Patrick Jane knew it shouldn't matter to him. It would have been more convenient for all this to happen a day or two later, but it wasn't as if he had any illusions that he was going to be nosing around crime scenes with the team next week, after all this was over. After Red John was dead. After McAllister was dead. He had to get used to saying the name, to his enemy being a specific individual rather than a faceless bogeyman.

But the topsy-turviness of the FBI takeover did bother him. The CBI had become his home over the past decade, the solid ground under his feet amid the swirling chaos of a random universe, and he would have liked to imagine it continuing on just the same as it always had been, even if he wasn't able to be part of it anymore.

So he sought out his most basic comfort: a cup of tea. Sophie Miller had given him this refuge, thus setting herself unwittingly on the path to having her severed head stowed in her own oven. There were so many things you couldn't control in the world, that you couldn't know no matter how precise your perceptions. You couldn't bring your wife and child back from the dead. You couldn't intuit a killer's identity from a perfectly manicured crime scene. You couldn't even stop the visions of blood from blooming behind your eyelids every time you tried to sleep. But you could make a cup of tea. You could choose a cup and boil water and dunk the teabag the exact right number of times for that varietal, and the outcome would be the same every time. Tea was real, tangible, reliable. The taste was better if you could manage loose leaf in a pot, of course, but that required too much equipment to be readily available in almost any kitchen, business or home, and therefore it was inferior for Jane's purposes.

The kitchen was blessedly free of federal agents – no one apparently thought evidence of corruption was hiding in the refrigerator – and by the time his Oolong was brewed, he felt more like himself again. Cutting ties with the CBI slightly ahead of schedule would not significantly impede his plans, not now that the endgame was at hand. The confusion might even play to his advantage, with Blake Association members more worried about their own potential arrest than following orders from above.

He made his way back to the SCU bullpen, and he was glancing up, momentarily distracted by the look of distress on Lisbon's face, when someone knocked into him, and as he lurched off balance the saucer slipped from his hand. He grabbed at it, smooth ceramic slipping past his fingertips, and by some miracle of physics the cup's handle caught on the tip of his little finger even as the saucer smashed into the floor. He stared down at the cornflower blue shards littering the ground at his feet, the cup caught precariously above disaster, his heart pounding, and as he raised his other hand to secure the surviving half of the set, the kaleidoscope of his mind spun abruptly into a new pattern, taking in the slenderness of chance that separated salvation from destruction, the unpredictable forces that could arrive from nowhere and alter the outcome of even the most pedestrian of activities, and the ease with which something that had through sheer familiarity become precious could be lost forever.

Patrick Jane looked up, taking in the horrified faces of the rest of his team, whose eyes were fixed on the broken saucer as if it were a dropped baby, and the feds who continued their activities without the slightest interest, and he understood that he had been unforgivably short-sighted.

* * *

"You think we should do _what?_" Lisbon demanded two hours later, as the team huddled around Grace's living room for Jane's urgently requested meeting.

"Find out if we can trust Abbott, and bring in the FBI," Jane repeated. The whole team was staring at him as if he'd grown a second head. He really felt they ought to be more used to surprises by now.

"Right, but why?" Van Pelt asked.

"What's the con?" Cho added.

"There's no con," Jane told them, spreading his hands in a gesture of peace. "If we're going to clean up this mess properly, we're going to need law enforcement resources, and that means a working relationship with the Feds. We'll hardly be able to get anywhere if we're still suspects ourselves."

Four faces gazed back at him with rank disbelief.

Cho's mouth twitched minutely downward, an indication of severe displeasure. "If we're going to set fire to our careers by double-crossing the FBI," he said flatly, "we deserve to know how and why. In advance."

"That's not what's happening here," Jane assured them. "I promise. This is going to salvage your careers, not ruin them." It occurred to him, belatedly, that this was in fact true. He really was a reprehensible human being. But it was so hard to worry about trivial bureaucratic details like job prospects when so many fates far worse than unemployment hung over all of their heads.

Lisbon's face scrunched in the expression of mingled fury, mistrust, and desperation that had begun appearing after the debacle in Las Vegas. Since he'd abandoned her on the side of the highway on the drive to Malibu, it had surfaced on a near-hourly basis. Jane found it surprisingly painful to have directed at him, but he supposed that once things were over, one way or another, he'd be unlikely to encounter it on such a regular basis.

"A word," she growled at him, jerking her head toward the kitchen.

He obediently followed her. Once the door swung shut behind him, he leaned against the counter and gave her a pleasant smile, the picture of confident relaxation.

"You have been telling us since the day we met that Red John is yours and yours alone. You were so desperate to keep _me_ out the showdown you ditched me at the side of the road, and I'm supposed to be your partner. And now, suddenly, you're bringing in a whole FBI team? I don't buy it."

"I was right to ditch you," Jane protested. "You think who survived that bomb and who didn't was an accident? It was not. And which side of the room do you think you'd have been lying on when the dust cleared if you were there? What better way to weaken me before the final act than to kill or kidnap you?"

Lisbon visibly restrained herself from punching him. "All you're telling me is that Red John walked into that room – into what was supposed to be your big clever trap – with a better plan than you did. Which proves exactly what I've been telling you all along – you can't do this alone. You need backup."

"Yes. Hence, the FBI."

She shook her head. "I don't believe you. Come on. What are you actually planning?"

He saw that they could butt heads all day without making any progress. Well, her suspicions made sense based on the information she had about him and his intentions. He was no longer in a position to demand blind trust. "I admit that my plans are still developing, and that when we finally get Red John out of the shadows, I'd rather be the only person in the room. But since I'm the bait for any trap we set, I'm not too concerned about missing the action." She opened her mouth to interject and he raised a finger to stop her. "But I have had a change in perspective." He closed his eyes for a moment and let the mask of calm fall away. When he opened them again, he knew she would see the truth in him.

"The fantasy of me killing Red John and having my bloody vengeance was exactly that. A fantasy. Something to get me out of bed in the mornings. Any child knows that you daydream about slaying the dragon, not watching your friend lead it away in handcuffs. There's nothing viscerally satisfying about hearing my wife's killer read his Miranda rights. So yes. I fixated on my preferred outcome. And I also… bought into Red John's pretense that this was just between him and me. Everything was so _personal._ It warped my thinking. But I see clearly now. If it was just about bringing Red John down, I'd still be trying to do it my way. But the Blake Association isn't personal. And I have no personal vendetta against however many disciples he still has running around. Yet those are the resources he will bring to bear on our confrontation, and I'd be fool to go mano a mano against a whole strike force. Not to mention that even after he's dead – which is still the only acceptable outcome, because you know as well as I do that there's no way he'll ever face a fair trial or serve out a prison sentence – there are going to be some very angry minions out there desperate for revenge. Who we will be in no position to investigate and arrest if we're out in the cold."

Lisbon's expression had warmed from hostility to wariness. She was still trying to decide how much she could trust him. "So you'd be all right with an outcome that _isn't_ you killing him yourself?"

He looked into himself and tried to find an honest answer. She deserved that much. Besides which anything he admitted too glibly would be discounted as insincere. "I… can live with just being there to watch him die. But we have to be on the same page here. There isn't going to be a trial."

He watched her wrestle with it. Finally her chin jerked in a nod. As an officer of the law, she couldn't bring herself to verbalize an agreement to extrajudicial killing. But as a pragmatist, she knew he was right. "But what if the FBI keep you out of it?"

He shot her a dazzling grin. "Never you worry about that. I'll handle the FBI." He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her toward the door. "Let's go tell the team about the plan!"

She shot him a glare over her shoulder, communicating her resentment of the fact that he had failed to tell _her_ anything about the plan, but she tolerated his manhandling, so she wasn't really mad.

As soon as they were back in the living room, the others could tell from their expressions that Jane had convinced their boss.

He clapped his hands together as soon as he was seated back on the couch. Lisbon was wearing the resigned glower that meant she'd agreed to one of his schemes without being persuaded it wouldn't blow up in her face. "So here's what we're going to do," he said. "Rigsby and Cho will return to the CBI and find Agent Abbott. Cho will say he needs a private word and get him into an office, while Rigsby waits outside and makes sure there are no interruptions. Cho, you'll verify whether he's Blake Association. Try 'Tyger, Tyger' on him. If he doesn't respond to that, get him to show you his left shoulder. If there's no tattoo, tell him you can help him catch Red John sooner rather than later, but he can't bring in anyone we haven't individually vetted. Maybe talk up Red John's obsession with me, say I can lure him into a trap and I want to work together. Get him out of the building to a meeting with us. Van Pelt, I'll need you to find a back door into the CBI systems so we can access our case files. I'll give you a list of what we'll use to convince Abbott that he needs me to get to Red John, and that the threat of Blake Association moles is greater than he thinks."

"You think Abbott's going to go for it?" Van Pelt asked.

"I think he's not as by-the-book as he might appear," Jane told her. "He's having a hell of a lot of fun shutting down the CBI, but it's not just a power trip. He enjoys a degree of chaos and improvisation, as long as he's confident it won't come back and bite him in the ass." He shrugged. "I'll know if he'll do what we need him to after we meet."

"And if he won't?" Rigsby asked.

"Then we get rid of him."

"_Jane-" _Lisbon said, horrified.

"Relax, Lisbon. I just meant I'll hypnotize him so he forgets our conversation."

It was a mark of how far they'd come, he reflected, that they all seem satisfied with this.

"Fine," she said. "So what are you and I doing next?"

"I am going to refine the rest of the plan," he told her. "You can… find me a bag of breadcrumbs."

She shot him a look that meant _Really?_ He replied with the serene countenance of a man who meant what he said.

* * *

Jane allowed himself three full minutes to enjoy and memorize the sight – even the smell – of Tom McAllister's corpse. It was going to have its own private room in his memory palace, and he anticipated visiting frequently.

It had all ended just as it was supposed to. After Jane went in to the Alexandria Cemetery chapel, Abbott's team and Lisbon's surrounded the building and silenced Red John's guards. Jane played bait and distraction, and once McAllister stepped in and worked himself into a lather of gloating self-aggrandizement, once Jane had feigned defeat and gotten him into position, he'd thrown the pigeon into McAllister's face, and in the ensuing moment of panicked disruption, Lisbon stepped out from behind the altar and took her shot. She approached, kicked McAllister's gun away, and knelt down to check for life. That was when he surged up at her with a linoleum knife that appeared from nowhere. But she'd twisted his wrist and thrown her weight at him, forcing his blade into his own neck. He twitched several times and then went still.

Jane looked down at his own pristine suit, then at the puddle of blood spreading around McAllister. Lisbon had arterial spray across her chest. She stood across from him, watching him as he watched the body. He wasn't going to leave until he was sure there was no chance for emergency room heroics, until brain death was assured.

Once he had every detail fixed in place, he raised his gaze to Lisbon, who was watching him like he was a ticking bomb that she didn't think she could defuse. He had, for once, no idea at all what his face was telling her.

"You got him," she said slowly, voice low and calm. He glanced down at her bloody hands – she'd wiped them on her Kevlar vest, but it hadn't done much. "I know this isn't what you hoped for," she continued, hesitant but determined to get the words out, "but I'm glad he didn't take you down with him. You walk out of here free and clear. It's over. You can do anything now. You're free of him. That's the last thing he would have wanted. He didn't get to take anything else from us. I'm glad we didn't give him that satisfaction."

He nodded to indicate he'd taken the words in. Though of course she wasn't right. It wasn't over yet. And he'd taken all the time he could spare.

"Get Abbott in here," he said. "And have them bring in everyone they rounded up outside, but they're to stay at the back of the chapel, separated. I'll need to speak with them one at a time."

"Jane…" she said, voice aching with emotion.

Whatever it was she wanted from him, he couldn't give it to her. "Listen to me, Teresa," he said. "Ten minutes ago, McAllister was the head of two separate criminal enterprises. He was the only one who decided who got killed when. In an hour, his death will be all over the news, and every psychopath who thought he was their personal savior is going to come hunting for our heads. Yours and mine. We have to find them before they get to us. So I'm afraid whatever conversation you'd like to have with me is going to have to wait. We need to get to work. Now."

* * *

And work they did. Abbott led the search for Blake Association members from the FBI's Sacramento field office, while Lisbon's team (they'd all been deputized as acting federal agents so they could continue working with the CBI still disbanded) tackled Red John's disciples, starting with the woman they'd caught trying to enter the chapel during the showdown. Jane hopped back and forth between them, spending his days in interrogation after interrogation and his nights combing through evidence the team dug up at McAllister's properties, searching for new leads.

At his insistence, none of them went anywhere alone or unarmed. His paranoia was validated when Rigsby shot down one of McAllister's disciples going after Jane in a diner restroom. That was followed by a Red John copycat who successfully slaughtered a rookie agent of Abbott's.

Then Lisbon's attempted murderer made her move in the FBI parking lot, a stroke of luck resulting in a quick arrest and an extremely fruitful set of interviews.

Still, it was over a month until they felt confident that any followers left were either insignificant or incompetent enough that another murder attempt was unlikely. By that time the Blake Association investigation was chugging along nicely, with the main players under arrest and the FBI focusing primarily on identifying which specific criminal cases they'd subverted. The California Attorney General was going on a hiring spree trying to drum up enough judges and prosecutors to re-try the hundreds of convictions that were in the process of being thrown out due to tampering.

After the last wannabe serial killer was taken from FBI holding to jail awaiting trial, Jane turned to Lisbon and said, "Now it's over."

Then he lay down on his couch in their new bullpen and slept for thirty-eight hours straight.


	2. Chapter 2

II. The Lisbon Sanatorium

Teresa Lisbon didn't know what she'd expected Jane would do after he was finally rid of Red John, but it certainly wasn't this. The big three options had of course been death, jail, or riding off into the sunset never to be seen again. A breakdown had also been a possibility she'd entertained, but she'd imagined it being more dramatic, maybe with some screaming and garment-rending and lots of tears. She hadn't anticipated anything this _quiet._ It felt like she was being haunted by a living ghost.

Well, first had come the relentless manhunt after McAllister's death, during which Jane had seemed even less human than he had at the peak of his Red John obsession, because at least before he'd been animated by emotions, if only hatred and fury. In the aftermath, he turned ice cold, focused but impersonal. It yielded better results than his monomania had, but it was unsettling to witness day after day. Lisbon had been sure he was headed for some kind of reckoning once he hit his breaking point – that he would start shouting at her or hurt himself or destroy the FBI from within just because he could. Or disappear forever. You could never take that one off the table.

But he'd just finished the job and gone to sleep. And when he got up again, he'd been… vague. Not present. He reminded her of the man she'd first met all those years ago when he wandered into the CBI with rumpled clothes and a shell-shocked look on his face. It shook her that Red John's death had apparently hit him just as hard as his wife and daughter's.

The bright shiny Jane mask he'd so painstakingly constructed over their first year of acquaintanceship, and which he had subsequently worn so consistently that even she sometimes forgot all about the damaged, self-loathing man behind the curtain, had now all but disappeared. Jane still spent hours lying on his couch, but he wasn't scheming or napping. He just reclined, eyes open but blank, with a sad, tired look on his face. That was in fact how he spent most of his waking hours, whether prone or upright. He zoned out in suspects' homes, on car rides, sitting at a table with a cooling cup of tea frozen halfway to his mouth.

He still worked when prompted. He'd snap back into focus, nose around, ask a few seemingly irrelevant questions, and then provide his expert opinion before retreating back into his mental fog. But there were no cunning plans, no cons requiring costumes and props, no fake psychic acts. He was at his best in the interrogation room, where he seemed to approach every interview as a duel to the death. But he took no joy in victory. He no longer seemed to relish the puzzles of cases at all. Lisbon frankly didn't know why he was still there. Except that she supposed he didn't know where else to go or what else to do. Besides which, work was where she was.

Since he'd mentally checked out, he'd taken to following her around. "Like a baby duck imprinted on its mommy," Rigsby had memorably put it. Much as she hated the comparison, she couldn't deny it. He trailed after her around the FBI field office and out on investigations, and he followed her home at night. "There could still be murderers out there, and you know how unequipped I am to defend myself," he told her. "I'll be much safer on your couch."

Under normal circumstances she would never have permitted it, but under normal circumstances she didn't routinely ask herself if Jane would actually be better off in a mental institution, and even she could see that he was more himself around her than around other people, whom he frequently didn't seem to hear speaking to him anymore. And she had to admit that knowing where he was at night – knowing that he was safe – was reassuring to her too. So if he wanted to sleep on her couch – well, at least he was a tidy houseguest, and he made coffee for her in the mornings.

Except that he didn't stay on her couch. She didn't figure it out until she got up to pee in the middle of the night and stepped on something warm and soft where only cold floor should have been. He groaned in pain; she grabbed her gun but fortunately did not shoot him.

"What the hell, Jane?" she demanded once the lights were on and he had propped himself up against the side of her bed.

"Sorry," he said, gingerly feeling his abdomen. "You know, you're heavier than you look."

"Why were you lying on my bedroom floor?"

He had the grace to look sheepish. "I wanted to hear you breathing."

She managed to bite back her initial response of _That is really very creepy,_ but she suspected he could read it on her face anyway. "A normal stalker would just come in for a second to check I'm alive and then go out again," she told him.

"When have I been a normal anything?" he asked, which she had to admit was a fair point.

"Could you not listen to my continued respiration from somewhere not immediately underfoot?" she asked.

"How loud do you think your breathing is?" he replied. "I figured this was actually much lower on the stalker spectrum than climbing into bed next to you."

She screwed her eyes shut. "How often have you been doing this?" she asked.

A guilty silence was his only response. So, every night, then. "Have you actually _tried_ sleeping on the couch?" she demanded.

"Of course," he said. "But my dreams… It doesn't end well. I get more rest here."

She told herself that she should absolutely not find this even remotely endearing, and that she was a lunatic for not having already thrown him out of her house. Jane had finally destroyed her sanity. But he did need sleep. And he was clearly processing a lot of trauma. It wasn't entirely unreasonable for him to fear for her safety. She had been nearly murdered at least twice this year. And after everything, he was still here, where she could see him every day, and she was deeply, pathetically grateful for that. Who knew what he would decide to do, where he would decide to go, once he had recovered? So for now, during this grace period when he still needed her, between his old life and whatever came afterward, what could it hurt to indulge him? No one else had been through what they had. No one could judge what they needed to do to get by.

"You can't sleep on my floor," she said. "I'll most likely shoot you one of these nights, and in the mean time I can't get up for a drink of water. So just…" she gestured toward the other side of the bed.

He watched her face without moving for a moment. She waved him over again and stomped off to the bathroom, leaving him to take the invitation or leave it.

When she returned, he was curled up at the far end of the mattress facing away from her, apparently trying to pretend he wasn't really there to the greatest extent possible while occupying the same queen-sized bed as her. Appreciative of the effort, she turned off the light and got under the covers without acknowledging his presence.

In the morning, the other half of the bed was empty and the scent of coffee wafted in from the kitchen. Lisbon was both grateful for his restraint and concerned for his state of mind. This behavior ran entirely contrary to the Jane-typical approach of taking a mile for every inch offered, and she'd rather expected to wake up to find him either wrapped around her like an octopus or busily sifting through her underwear drawer, just to see how she'd react. He must really be terrified that he might push her too far and be exiled, she thought, even though she didn't think she'd given any indication that he might be wearing out his welcome. It occurred to her that catering to his anxious need for her presence might actually be making things worse. Maybe he needed her to re-establish normalcy by pushing him away. Maybe that would, paradoxically, make him feel more secure than her indulgence. On the other hand, if she left him on his own in his current condition, he could well wander out into traffic without noticing an oncoming truck.

She decided to give it some more time and see what happened.

That night when she went to bed, he followed behind her and hovered in her doorway until she waved him in. When she woke up in the morning, he was nowhere in sight.

It became a routine after that. They slept on opposite sides of the bed without touching, speaking, or looking at one another, and that absence of intimacy allowed her to pretend it was, if not normal, at least harmless. It did occur to her that she was almost certainly the first woman Jane had regularly shared a bed with since his wife. Then she thought that probably the reason he'd spent so many years sleeping in small spaces - a couch or a cot in the CBI attic - was that they left no empty space where another body ought to be but wasn't. She wondered what it meant about her place in his life that he was now sharing her bed, albeit in the most monkish fashion possible. Then she decided never to think about that again.

* * *

It was almost two weeks into their new sleeping arrangement when the team confronted her. The FBI had required Jane's assistance with an interrogation for another unit's case, so it was just the four of them out to lunch at an Indian restaurant.

"Boss, is Jane living with you?" Van Pelt asked.

Lisbon almost choked on a bite of her chicken tikka masala. "No! He's not living with me. He's just staying with me for a little while."

The others exchanged a look. "We're worried about you," Rigsby said earnestly. "Both of you."

"It doesn't seem healthy," Van Pelt said gently. "It's not fair for him to him to latch onto you this way. You're not his psychiatrist."

"Or his wife," Cho added bluntly.

"We think he needs professional help," Van Pelt concluded.

"You know how he feels about shrinks," Lisbon protested.

"He liked Sophie Miller well enough," Cho said.

Lisbon's mouth turned down. "I believe she's no longer practicing. And anyway you're over-reacting. He's getting better."

"Is he?" Van Pelt asked skeptically.

Lisbon ripped a piece of naan in half. "Yes. Maybe. I think so."

There was an unconvinced pause in which no one volunteered to contradict her.

"We're just saying," Rigsby cut in, conciliatory, around a mouthful of lamb vindaloo. "It's not right for you to turn your apartment into Jane's private loony bin."

"That is not what's happening!"

"You sure about that?" Cho asked.

Lisbon's hackles rose. "Yes. He's not crazy. He's - it's like those places," she said, groping after a half-familiar concept, "you know, where rich Europeans used to go to take the waters when they had tuberculosis or something."

"A sanatorium," Cho offered.

"Right, that. He's just - he needs somewhere safe to process everything that's happened, that's all. I don't think that's unreasonable or unhealthy given everything he's been through."

"And his safe place is your sofa?" Van Pelt asked.

Lisbon shrugged mulishly, glad none of them could see through her the the way Jane could.

"I dunno," Rigsby said to the others. "Sounds about right to me. I mean, you know how they are."

Van Pelt and Cho nodded at this, and Lisbon decided she was much happier not knowing what they thought that meant.

Van Pelt tactfully changed the subject to their current case, and that was the end of the intervention.

* * *

The conversation stayed with her though, and over the following days she found herself watching Jane more closely, trying to see if he was in fact getting better. She noticed there were certain things that seemed to jog him at least briefly out of his pensive fog: warm sunshine on his face. A squirrel scolding him from the branch above his head. A touch of her hand. Foods could do it - a ripe peach, or the stir-fry dinner she'd made with too much hot pepper.

It occurred to her that these types of physical sensations had been unusually important to him for as long as she'd known him. Perhaps that was normal for someone who lived as much in his own mind as Jane did - he needed to remind himself he had a body. Or perhaps it was a coping skill he'd learned after losing his family.

So she tried to give him more of those moments - to point out a dew-jeweled spiderweb at an early morning crime scene, to give him dinners with a kick or a decadent dessert, to drag him out for a walk or a hike or a picnic in the park on their days off, to talk to him more, even if their conversations tended to trail off into silence partway through. It seemed important to anchor him to the present.

Some days he seemed to be getting better, to take a bit of an interest in a case, to notice not merely her presence but her state of mind. He would fetch her snacks if she was hungry and cranky, or prod her to go home if she stayed too late finishing her paperwork. But he still wouldn't voluntarily venture further from her than the distance from her desk to the break room, and she was starting to think that might be a bad sign.

Maybe he did need more help than she could give him. Maybe she was handling him all wrong. Maybe if she didn't try something different, in six months she'd still be unable to go out for a date without him tagging along like her handsome blond shadow.

Despite the distrust of mental health professionals that Carmen had cemented in her, she'd met an awful lot of them over the years. She sifted through her memory archives until she came up with one she'd actually liked: a man who'd reminded her of a favorite priest from her childhood, despite having no visible religiosity. He'd been the brother of a murder vic, genuine in his grief but still radiating empathy for the rest of his family and an unwillingness to tolerate bullshit or equivocation from the investigators on the case.

He turned out to remember her, too. Lisbon scheduled a coffee meeting with him, leaving Jane behind with the admonition that she needed a few hours off from him and he was not to contact her unless it was an emergency. He accepted this readily enough, which was a significant relief.

The therapist, Dr. Sugimoto, exchanged pleasantries with her as they sipped their drinks at the homey cafe he'd suggested for their meeting, then let the conversation lapse so she could gather her thoughts.

She rubbed her finger along the rim of her coffee mug and took a deep breath. "I have a friend," she said. "A close friend. Years ago, something terrible happened to him. His wife and child died. He felt he was to blame. He had a breakdown, and after he got past that he dedicated himself to punishing their killer. He recently accomplished that goal, and since then he's been... Lost. Withdrawn. He spends hours on end staring into space, he's no longer interested in his work. He only shaves when I remind him to. I'm worried about him. I wanted to ask what you think someone in that situation would need." She cleared her throat. "If there's something I can do to help him, or if there's help he needs that I can't give."

The doc smiled warmly. "I'll do my best to help. Let's start with the basics. Do you think your friend is a danger to himself or others?"

"No."

"Good. Do you think he's able to tell the difference between what's real and what's only in his mind?"

"Yes. He sometimes seems unaware of what's going on around him, but he comes back when I - when something catches his attention. He's not delusional or anything."

"Does he seem to be in unbearable pain?"

This required more thought. She tried to reconstruct the glimpses she had of his face in the moments when the fog cleared, when he was returning to himself from wherever he spent his mental retreats. There was pain in his eyes then, and shame, and regret, and sadness, but she'd seen worse in him over the years.

"I do think he's in pain," she said. "Unbearable... probably not."

"Then it doesn't sound like he's in crisis. How long has he been - lost, as you put it?"

"Over a month."

Sugimoto took a sip of tea. "That's not so long."

"It's not?"

"I would be concerned if you told me it had gone on for a year without improvement. But a month is not a long time to struggle with the kind of trauma your friend has experienced. Does he talk to you about what he's going through?"

"No."

"But you do spend time with him?"

She grimaced. "We work together. And he's been... crashing at my place. He seems... to find my presence reassuring."

"That's very good!"

"It is?"

"It means he's not isolating himself. If he's seeking out your company, he's giving himself safety and comfort while he works through his troubles."

"So I should keep letting him follow me around? It's not bad for him?"

"Far from it." He glanced out the window, then back at her face, his expression serious. "Freud once called psychoanalysis the cure through love. There is truth to that. We are deeply social creatures. When I build a relationship with a patient, I create a safe, warm place where he or she can learn and grow without fear of judgment or rejection. This is something we can only get from another person. You can't get it from a pill prescription or a self help book - not that those can't be helpful tools, but they cannot love you back. The relationship you have with your friend, while of course not therapeutic in nature, is one of affection and trust. I can see how concerned you are for him. He can sense that as well, and he takes refuge in your care. You should not sacrifice your own wellbeing, and if you need space from him you should feel very free to take it, but for his own sake, pushing him away would not be helpful."

Lisbon flushed. "Thanks. Thanks. That's good to hear." She sipped her coffee. "So, other than not kicking him to the curb, is there anything else I can do to help?"

"Just try to help him focus on the concrete and immediate when you can. It can be healing to tend a garden or care for an animal - to connect with the natural world. To cook a meal or craft something with your hands. To be in the body as well as the mind. He may wander in his thoughts, but he must have somewhere tangible to come back to."

"I can do that," she said, wondering what Jane would say if she came home with a kitten.

* * *

Lisbon worried less after her meeting with Dr. Sugimoto. She decided against bringing an animal into her home, but did go shopping for several houseplants, and tasked Jane with their care, under which they flourished. She bought him a package of origami paper and began to find charmingly folded creatures in drawers and kitchen tins.

As the weeks passed, she found signs that he was returning to himself. He began to talk to her more - not about the things that weighed on his mind directly, but on what she inferred were tangential concerns. They debated fine ethical distinctions between one hypothetical situation and another, or how one balanced the spirit and letter of the law. Occasionally he offered up an anecdote from his past, nothing emotionally significant, but a tidbit she imagined had floated across his mind as he reflected on some more momentous episode.

The first time he proposed a convoluted scheme to catch a criminal, she privately wanted to do a little dance. His periods of silent introspection continued, but between them he became more and more the Jane she was used to, by turns winning and infuriating. He took over grocery shopping for the both of them, and in the mornings she came down to a full breakfast as well as a fresh pot of coffee. While he still stuck close to her, he would of his own volition go off on an errand or pair with another team member for an interview.

After a couple of months, she began to feel he was near the end of whatever process he was going through. He'd started flirting with her again, and going behind her back at work, disappearing for the better part of a day only to invite her to his carefully-orchestrated denouement, glancing over to her at the moment of confession with a self-satisfied grin as if he had pulled a bouquet of flowers out of thin air for her. As ever, she wanted to punch that look right off his face, and even that impulse toward violence was comforting: it meant she didn't feel the need to treat him with kid gloves anymore.

But her relief at his recovery was coupled with a rising anxiety. A change was waiting in the wings, and she had no idea what form it would take. She might stumble into the kitchen any morning to find a note that said, "Thanks for everything, I'm off to enjoy the rest of my life on the French Riviera."

Besides which, cohabiting with an almost-fully-functional Jane was a very different experience than living with a ghostly convalescent. Sometimes the space seemed so full of him, of his energy, his messy curls and dangerous smiles, that she could hardly breathe. Sharing a bed with him had started to feel inappropriate, even though it was the one place where his behavior hadn't changed at all - no looks, no words, no contact of any kind - and she knew she ought to kick him out. He didn't need her to be his security blanket anymore. She was certain he'd be able to sleep perfectly well on her couch. But evicting him would require talking about their current sleeping arrangements, and she didn't want to touch that conversation with a ten foot pole. Still, the way he was a flirt in the office and a nonentity in her bedroom was driving her slowly insane. It felt like his charming banter was a trick, a manipulation, a way to get what he wanted out of her while the truth he showed her every night was that underneath the games, he felt nothing for her at all.

And for all that, she couldn't say he was in the wrong. She'd taken him in without the expectation of repayment, of her own free will. He'd already surrendered to her on what mattered most to him - Red John's death - and he owed her nothing further.

Still, sooner rather than later, something was going to give. There was an uncertainty in him now, a set of scales tipping one way and then another where once there had been the taut desperation of his quest for revenge. She didn't know what was hanging in the balance, or whether he would settle it for himself or she would snap and force his hand, but she feared that when the moment of truth had come and gone, she would find herself alone amid the wreckage.


	3. Chapter 3

III. The Awakening

Patrick Jane woke in the pale predawn light and rolled over in bed. He was sleeping less again, though his nightmares had eased. He had grown impatient with himself, restless as an animal left too long in a too-small cage. He was free of Red John, of the monster who had taken his family and over a decade of his life, and now his very freedom chafed at him, a pair of new shoes he couldn't seem to break in.

He knew Lisbon and the team had been worried about him, but he'd had neither the ability nor the desire to explain himself. Indeed, he'd spent months trying to account for himself to himself, and though he had finally begun to find solid ground beneath his feet, it was terra incognita, and he had no map or compass to chart it with.

He had wandered through his memory palace, trying to understand who he was and what he was to do with himself, to see what he'd become without the blinkers of guilt and hatred blinding him to everything outside his narrow path to self-destruction, and after sifting through the bits and bobs that had amounted to his life, he had more questions than answers.

Unwilling to cave in to frustration so early in the day, he spent several minutes clearing his mind, using a breathing exercise to calm his body. When he felt the last of his tension drain away, he opened his eyes and beheld Teresa Lisbon, asleep a pillow's length away.

She was beautiful in the thin light, pale skin and dark hair turning her into an charcoal sketch of herself, a portrait just for him. The sight kindled a familiar warmth in his chest, and he took the time to memorize the moment, to fully render in his mind the way the shadows brushed her cheeks, the gentle parting of her lips. Once complete, he entered his memory palace to stow it away. Lisbon had her own space there now, a simple chapel with a few wooden pews, bare of icons except the single stained glass window depicting a warrior queen that filled the space with soft, dappled light. The right hand side was filled with memories of their work together, the left with information he'd gleaned about her personally, moments of friendship and unexpected connection. He went past these to the unobtrusive door near the back. It opened onto an unlit closet filled with stacks of small wooden boxes, each engraved with an image that served as its label. He carefully wrapped the fresh memory of her chiaroscuro repose with silver tissue paper and enclosed it in a new box, this one marked with Sleeping Beauty in her tower.

He carefully set the box on top of the others, and then, just as he was about to step back into the comforting glow of the main chapel, he hesitated. It occurred to him that in all his recent travels through his memory palace, he hadn't re-examined the contents of that closet. That was why these memories were stored away, after all - to keep them somewhere safe but also safely out of sight, where they couldn't cause trouble.

Yet if he had set out to know his own mind, he was a fool to let this corner go unexplored. He had another urge to back away and shut the door. It was the very potency of this fear that led him to act. He had to face anything that held such power over him.

With a trembling hand, he reached out and turned on the lights. Suddenly, what had seemed in the dark to be barely more than a cupboard was revealed to be a long passageway, lined on either side by stacks of boxes higher than he could reach, stretching back as far as he could see. His heart hammering, he threw out his arm, summoning the collection of memories from their boxes. They flew out, each bright bauble piercing him with beauty and longing. The hallway was lit as if by ten thousand glittering stars, each one a moment when Teresa Lisbon had moved him in a way he had no longer believed possible. Clearly he had been wrong. Because he was standing in the midst of a fairyland of his own making, and even he could understand what that meant.

He was in love.

Jane opened his eyes and realized he was weeping. He was trembling, his heart beating like a rabbit's, and part of him wanted to shake Lisbon awake and vomit his newfound feelings all over her, to demand that she sort this out the same way she'd cleaned up all his other messes, but even in this extremity, his self-control would not permit such recklessness.

So he slipped silently out of her bed and crept to the kitchen to fix himself a cup of tea, still reeling from the impact of his epiphany. He sat in a stupor of dumb wonder for the duration of his first cuppa, then mechanically procured himself a refill and gave himself a figurative shake by the scruff of his neck when the fog still refused to clear. He needed to think. He needed to think, and he needed to not do something stupid. That probably, he admitted, meant doing his thinking outside of Teresa's immediate vicinity. They were between cases, so there'd be no harm in playing hooky. He finished his tea, dressed in clothes he'd squirreled away in the closet of the guest room she used as an office, and scrawled a note that he was taking the day off but would be back in time for dinner. He supposed she might be miffed at unexpectedly having to fix her own breakfast, but under the circumstances there was nothing else to be done.

Outside, the sun was just rising, which seemed irritatingly symbolic. Yes, yes, he was a right idiot, he conceded to the universe.

He stopped at his favorite diner for eggs, and as he waited for his meal, he forced order on the thoughts that had been running circles around his mind like headless chickens.

First things first: was he actually in love with her? On the one hand, the evidence locker of his own mind seemed indisputable; on the other, surely this was something an intelligent man would have noticed about himself some time ago, were it true.

And yet, there had been good reasons those memories had been locked away in the dark. Admitting his feelings would have been an unacceptable risk with Red John at large, determined to destroy every piece of his happiness. Though McAllister had surely known she was of vital importance to his life and his quest, if Jane himself had realized the depth of his feelings, they would have left him useless with terror. Besides which, he would have felt an unbearable conflict between his duty of vengeance to Angela and the obligations to Lisbon that love would have entailed. How could he have lived with himself if he'd both loved her and still planned - yearned even - to leave her in the most brutal way possible, betraying both her hopes for him and the ideals she cherished?

And yet in the end he had chosen another way, and he had done so in no small part to protect her.

Needing to be sure of himself, he returned to his memory palace and once again opened the door in the chapel. This time there was no darkness. The wooden boxes had turned to glass, each glowing from within. He was transfixed by the spectacle of it, amazed that a man as broken and battered as he could have something of such beauty within him. His chest felt tight and warm, as if his heart was choking on a sudden surfeit of honey after starving for years.

The sound of a plate clattering onto his table brought him back to reality. He blinked tears away and thanked the waitress for his eggs.

Well, that answered the first question. He was no stranger to love, even if he'd never felt this particular flavor of it before. He knew what he now carried inside him.

The next question, of course, was what to do about it. As he ate his breakfast, he considered the question of Lisbon's feelings for him. It was clear from the degree to which she'd allowed him into her life that she felt an affection and closeness for him. While she was a sucker for strays and misfits, she was also a deeply private person, protecting herself with walls around her heart, and sympathy alone would not have gained him such access to her personal life. She would have taken care of any member of her team after a great upheaval, but he doubted that even Cho or Rigsby could have inveigled themselves so easily into her bedroom.

Good lord, he'd been sleeping in the woman's bed for months without realizing his feelings. He really was a prize idiot.

He knew she thought of him as a friend - if pressed she would probably admit he was her best friend. And he knew she found him attractive - her physical reactions to him had revealed that much from the start. The hunt for Red John had built a private intensity between them, a shared obsession that generated a warped kind of intimacy. There had doubtless been moments when she'd been a little in love with him, whether or not she'd admitted it to herself.

But where did she stand now? For months, she'd been his caretaker, and no doubt deeply uncertain about his plans for the future. He'd proved himself unreliable in the past, and nothing in his recent behavior would have persuaded her that he might have changed his ways. There was the fact that in the end, he'd given up Red John's death to her, but they'd never discussed it after - for all she knew, he might be deeply resentful about it.

If he knew Teresa Lisbon, he'd bet she had buried any feeling she might harbor for him beyond friendship as deeply as possible, to protect herself from whatever further heartbreak he might see fit to inflict on her.

No, she wasn't going to leap into his arms with abandon the moment he declared himself, but that was fine. He'd always enjoyed a challenge, and between their chemistry, their closeness, and his skill at seduction, he had no doubt that if he set his mind to it, sooner or later he'd be able to win her over.

But should he?

The bitter flavor of that question killed the remainder of his appetite, and he settled his bill and returned to his car. He drove aimlessly, finally pulling over at a park where Teresa liked to go for picnics. He wandered over to a bench by the duck pond and dropped heavily onto it, but for once the quacks of the beggars paddling over in hopes of a feeding did nothing to raise his spirits.

Jane had no illusions about his own character. He had a deep capacity for love and loyalty, but he was also selfish, manipulative, deceitful, secretive, self-aggrandizing, stubborn, arrogant, and reluctant to compromise. He had not been the husband Angela deserved, and if he succeeded in securing Teresa's affections, he would undoubtedly be unworthy of her as well. She was a fundamentally good, generous, forgiving person, and if he returned to his old ways while with her romantically, he would hurt her deeply while never letting her escape his clutches to find true fulfillment with someone better matched to her character. Even if he tried his best to be a better man and meet her needs, there was no guarantee of success. And Teresa Lisbon's future and happiness were not things to be gambled with, especially not on the whim of a moment.

This was, he realized sourly, going to require more thought than he had imagined.

He returned to her apartment that evening without any clarity, and they shared a subdued meal. He could tell she saw there was something amiss with him, but she had no idea what and wasn't going to press him.

He had decided to do nothing to change the status quo, but climbing into her bed that night felt like lying down on a bed of nails. It was suddenly agonizing to be so close to her, in a chaste parody of what he wanted, and not even be able to whisper her name without upsetting the tenuous balance between them. What had he been thinking to do this to both of them? He hadn't been thinking at all, of course, hadn't been able to see past the panic and paranoia that filled his head with thoughts of her drenched in blood, a dripping smiley face on her bedroom wall. He had needed the comfort of her proximity to relax into slumber, and he'd needed to sleep if he wasn't going to go mad, and now he was paying the price for his thoughtless selfishness. It had to be sending her the wrong message keep doing this, but he couldn't move toward her until he'd decided what he should do, and retreating to the couch or checking into a hotel might make her feel she was losing him. He had no desire to make her worry more, and even less to be asked questions he wasn't ready to answer.

The best thing he could do was sort out his own mind and make a decision, so he could get them out of this limbo of so-close-but-so-far one way or the other. So he shut his eyes and forced his body to relax, and he thought about the future.

It took him a week to come to a conclusion. He used that time to test out the waters in the most innocent of fashions: he took her out to a movie she wanted to see. He bought her a new plant. He made a special trip to the deli on the far side of town to bring her her favorite sandwich for lunch. He confined his brooding to its traditional venues: pretending to nap on his couch at work and pretending to sleep in bed at night. He made sure he was fully present when they spent time together, entertaining her with silly arguments and stories about his fake psychic days. This was partially to ease her out of her view of him as a convalescent in a delicate mental condition, and partially to test his capacity to please her in small, easy ways. He, in turn, was satisfied with both the success of his gambits, and the degree to which her pleasure pleased him. For the vast majority of their relationship, his need to keep on her good side for murderer-hunting purposes had been inextricably twined with his desire to make her smile for her own sake, or for the sake of his vanity. It was reassuring to know that pleasing her was significantly more rewarding without the ulterior motivations. Or at least none worse than wanting her to think well of him and enjoy his company.

He was lying on his couch in the FBI bullpen when he finished assessing the possible outcomes and concluded that he had the right to pursue Lisbon. It was such a relief that he sat straight up, gasping like he'd been testing his breath underwater. The woman in question was not present to witness the moment, but Van Pelt gave him a strange look and asked if he was all right.

"Never better!" he said with a sunny grin, jumping off the couch to prepare a celebratory cup of tea. Now, at last, he could move on to the fun part with a clear conscience - it was time to come up with the best scheme of his career, the one that would win his fair Lisbon's heart.

There was only one problem: nothing he thought of would work. He wasn't discouraged by the first day of unsuccessful plotting, or the second. After that a pesky case came along, and they had to spend three days driving back and forth to Yosemite before solving the murder. And by the end of it, he was no closer to his goal than at the start. He'd come up with dozens of dazzling romantic escapades (his favorite involved a castle in Ireland and a very well trained cockatoo), but whenever he pictured Lisbon's reaction at the climactic moment, she just rolled her eyes and laughed at him.

But of course she knew him too well. She was well aware of his capacity for grand gestures and improbable shenanigans. And, he realized with an unpleasant sinking sensation, each one of his surpassingly clever plans was really just a way to show off for her. To peacock about and display his shiny tail-feathers to their best advantage. They weren't about her or what she might want or need from him. He was already failing at being the right man for her and he hadn't even started yet.

He went back to the drawing board, which is to say he lay back on the couch and closed his eyes. He considered what Teresa's objections to him as a suitor might be, and how he could overcome them. It was a depressingly long list. That was all right. He'd faced worse obstacles in the past and emerged triumphant. Triumphant-ish.

After four days, he'd developed a fool-proof plan that would be very little fun and take at least six months to execute. That was just pathetic. And if his earlier schemes had been too much him and not enough her, this one was the reverse. There had to be a better way.

Then it hit him. The thing that she most wanted from him was honesty. She wanted to be in on the gag, to understand where he was coming from and why he did the things he did. To see what was underneath the mask. And she was right. If he couldn't give those things to her, he had no business pursuing her. So he would give her the truth, so much of it that she couldn't help but see him differently - see _them_ differently.

It was the perfect game plan. He thought it would also be among the hardest things he'd ever done in his life. But it would be worth it.


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's Note:** Some of you have been curious about how much longer this story will be - it's shaping up to be 8 or 9 chapters total. Thank you all for reading!

* * *

IV. The First Confession

"Do you have any plans for this weekend?" Jane asked her on Tuesday as they sat at her kitchen table, dining on leftovers from the shepherd's pie he'd made on Sunday.

Lisbon shot him a questioning look. He just raised his eyebrows back at her expectantly. "No, I don't think so," she said.

"Let's go away together for a couple of days," he said.

She frowned, trying to figure him out. He'd been different the past few weeks - more engaged, more upbeat, preoccupied but in a way distinct from the months before. Even so, this was unprecedented behavior. "Why?" she asked.

"You've done so much for me," he said. "I want to do something nice for you, for both of us really. We'll spend a couple days at the coast, walk on the beach, drink some wine, maybe fly a kite if we want to get fancy."

It was on the tip of her tongue to say that maybe something nice for her would be a couple of days _not_ spent in his company, but she suspected it would sound worse out loud than it did in her head, in addition to which she didn't really mean it. Distressingly enough, a weekend trip without him was less appealing than one with him, especially now that he'd recovered enough to keep up his end of a conversation. Still, that was no reason to give in. "What's the trick?" she asked.

"No trick," he said, spreading his hands to demonstrate his patently false innocence.

"There's always a trick with you," she said. "I'm not saying no yet, I just want to know what I'm getting into. Will I be expected to wear a costume? What are the chances of jail time?"

"No dress up, no getting arrested, no trouble. Look, if you're so worried, how about this - you can pick where we go. Anywhere within a three hour drive of Sacramento. Just name your pleasure."

She gave him a dark look. All that told her was that he could arrange for whatever trouble he had in mind to come to them, wherever they happened to be. And that meant it could even happen in Sacramento, but he didn't want it to. Besides which, there was a glimmer in his eye that told her this little jaunt meant something to him. She really, really wished he could ever once just tell her what he had up his sleeve ahead of time. But then, she supposed when it mattered most, he had. And that had to buy him a little leeway. Besides which, she was glad he was taking more of an interest in life again, even if that mainly consisted of landing her in one mess after another.

"Fine," she said. "Whatever, plan your stupid weekend. But for the record, I would really rather know what you're getting me into before it all hits the fan."

"Lisbon, you are a gem among women," he said, grinning.

She wondered how much she was going to regret going along with this.

* * *

Jane spent the rest of the week napping on his couch as usual, between intermittent bouts of work. The case they were on was still in its early stages, and research had never been his strong point - he just chimed in occasionally to direct their efforts down some new rabbit hole.

He gave no indication at all what might be in store for her over the weekend. There was the occasional gleam in his eye when he looked at her, a twitchiness in his coiled energy when he leapt off the couch to announce his current brainwave, but as usual his cards were held tight to his chest.

She ran through possibilities in her head - something to do with some old friends of his that he needed her help with? A cold case he wanted to dig into for reasons of his own? But the one that she couldn't put out of her mind was that he really might have no ulterior motive beyond what he'd claimed: to spend a weekend with her. That was the sort of thing a man did when he had something significant to say. Like for example that the past ten years had been great, but it was time for him to strike out on his own. So long and thanks for bringing down my nemesis.

So it was with a sense of deep trepidation that she let him herd her out to his car at four p.m. that Friday. She didn't even put up a fight about driving. She'd agreed to put herself in his hands - now there was nothing to do but wait and see what fresh hell he was going to drop her into.

* * *

It turned out to be a vacation house atop the oceanside cliffs near Monterey. They arrived at twilight, the sky still a fading dusky pink, but when she moved to unbuckle her seatbelt, Jane caught her hand to stop her. She looked up at his face, and what she saw there shocked her. He looked determined and afraid, and there was a deeper emotion behind those that she couldn't name.

"Teresa," he said, as she stared back at him as if hypnotized, "I want to say something before we go inside. I want to make a promise to you. I know you've wondered why I brought you here. I did it so I could talk to you about some things that have been on my mind. But we won't get anywhere if you're constantly trying to figure out what's true and what's a lie. We both know I've deceived you many, many times, but I'm going to make my promise now. While we're in that house, everything I say to you will be the truth. Furthermore, you can ask me anything you want, and I will be honest and direct, even if the answer is just that I'm not ready to talk about it yet. No misdirection, no evasion. Do you think you can accept that?"

Her mind spun. His obviously planned speech made her more sure than ever that there was some game afoot, but she thought that he'd meant what he said. And two days of an honest Jane was so far outside the scope of her imagination that she had no idea how to react. But if there was even a chance this was real, it was too valuable an opportunity to squander with stubbornness. "I'll try," she said, voice barely there.

He smiled softly. "Thank you."

With that, he got out of the car and began unloading more grocery bags and coolers than she'd imagined would fit in the Citroen's trunk. He was apparently planning to spend the whole weekend eating.

By the time she'd brought her suitcase in and given herself a tour of the house (two bedrooms, a living room with a wall of windows opening onto a broad deck and a spectacular view of the cove below, a fireplace, and a TV bigger than her desk at work, and then an exercise room, spacious kitchen, and a dining room), Jane had put away the supplies, opened a bottle of wine, and set out plates of overstuffed French rolls and snack foods. It must be magic, she decided, helping herself to a sandwich as she leaned against the kitchen counter.

The taste was amazing. "What's in this?" she demanded, unable to identify the flavor.

"Duck confit, cranberry chutney, and water cress," he told her, and held up his glass of wine. She picked up hers obediently to clink against it. "To turning over a new leaf," he said, and took a sip. "Thank you for coming here with me."

She sipped her own wine - a smooth red with a big flavor, she didn't know what kind - to cover her uncertainty. She didn't know what he wanted from her. She didn't know what the look on his face meant.

Whatever it was, it folded away into a teasing smile. "Go ahead," he said. "Break the ice."

"Excuse me?"

"Ask me a question. You know you want to find out if I meant what I said. Whatever it is you've been worried about, just spit it out."

She hadn't known the words were in her until he prompted them, but before she could bite them back they spilled out: "Are you leaving?"

She stuffed another bite of sandwich in her mouth to try and erase whatever pathetic thing her face was trying to do while she awaited his answer.

He saluted her with his glass, completely unruffled. "Excellent opening salvo, dear. You've asked a very vague question, so I can respond in a variety of ways. I could deflect, and say, well of course I'm leaving this exact spot, and pretty soon too. I could be equally vague, and say yes or no without explanation. Or I could turn it around and put you on the spot by asking what exactly you meant. But there's no need. I imagine you meant some amalgam of am I leaving the job, am I leaving Sacramento, and am I leaving you, and fortunately the answer to each of those is the same: no."

"Oh," she said, trying and probably failing to hide her relief. She took another bite of sandwich, wanting to press him for confirmation, for reassurance that he'd meant what he said, but she felt too weak already. He could probably see how tight her throat was, how her eyes were burning, and she didn't want to make it worse.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said kindly, laying a hand on her shoulder, and she hated him all over again for seeing through her. "I'm sorry you were concerned - I should have made that clear sooner, but since leaving was the farthest thing from my mind, I didn't realize it was on yours."

It was too much. Lisbon switched instantly into defensive mode. "Why are we here then?" she demanded.

"Excuse me?"

"If we aren't here so you can say goodbye, what is the reason?"

He paused, visibly weighing the requirements of his promise. "I want to talk to you. To tell you about some things I have - I have never talked about, with anyone. I thought it would be easier for both of us if we had some space outside of our routines, with no distractions."

She was unwillingly disarmed, but still saw he was leaving something out. "To what end?" she asked more gently. "What are you trying to accomplish?"

"To be closer to you," he said. "To help us understand each other better. To share some of my reflections on the past and hopes for the future. Beyond that... I guess it depends where the conversations take us."

She suspected there was more to it, but he was clearly making an effort, and it seemed unsporting to push him too hard. "All right, so what's the agenda for this weekend of mutual understanding? Are we on a schedule?"

He relaxed and popped an olive in his mouth. "There are... four general topics I have in mind. I thought we'd start with one tonight, then get through two tomorrow, leaving one for Sunday before we drive home."

"Okay," she said, and returned to her sandwich. Once it was finished and she'd licked the crumbs from her fingers and washed them down with wine, she looked up to find him watching her with an odd look on his face. She dabbed her face with a napkin just in case. "So what's on the docket for tonight?" she asked.

He gave her a dangerously wicked smile. "Well, Saint Teresa," he said, "I want to confess my sins."

She raised an eyebrow and refilled her glass. "I believe confession traditionally takes place in the living room," she said.

But once they were settled at opposite ends of the couch in front of a flickering fire, there was no humor left in him. His face was drawn and he twisted the ring on his finger.

Lisbon knew enough to wait for him to take the lead, so she sipped her wine and watched the fire, trying not to add to the tension in the room.

"You probably imagine," he began at last, "that I was good husband and father. I know people assume I wouldn't have been so hell-bent on vengeance if what I lost wasn't some blissful ideal of family life. But I think sometimes that if I hadn't failed them so many times, if I only had to carry the guilt from one bad day and not thousands of them, it might have been easier to let them go. If I could have told myself that at least I'd done right by them while I had them."

She opened her mouth to say - she didn't know what - but he silenced her with a glance. "Of course I loved them," he said dismissively, as if that counted for nothing. "I loved them with my whole heart, as well as I was able. But I'm afraid that wasn't saying much." He raised his eyes to meet hers, and there was no doubt in them about what he was saying. "Think about what you know about the man I used to be, Teresa. Ask yourself if honestly, putting aside all my pious grief, you believe that vain charlatan would have made a good husband."

He looked back at the fire, not waiting for a response. "At first things weren't so bad. Angie and I were young, newly married, finally out of the carny circuit. We had a crappy little apartment full of yard sale furniture, and we were happy. But it wasn't enough for me. As much as I'd hated working for my father, I wanted the big time. I wanted to do what I was good at. I was never going to get a straight job and kowtow to a boss, but I could have made more than enough for us to live on just gambling a few nights a month. But I wanted my name in lights, and the fake psychic schtick was just so _easy_. Angie never wanted me to do it. She said she hadn't run away from the show just to move in with a different one. And the more she criticized, the more I dug in my heels. I wasn't preying on the poor and desperate anymore, just squeezing the rich and gullible, and what was so bad about that? They could part with the money easily enough, and in exchange I gave them hope or a way to reconcile with the death of a loved one. Really it was practically like restoring balance to the world to leech some of that extra cash away from them. And if my clients weren't complaining, why should my wife? But she did complain.

"By the time I'd gotten myself on TV, she knew I was never going to quit. She wanted to know why our life together wasn't enough for me, and I couldn't get her to understand that there was nothing wrong with taking more and more, as long as the world kept serving it up to me on a platter. She said it wasn't about the money, it was about me. She didn't like the person the work turned me into. She loved Paddy, her husband, but she couldn't stand the Great Patrick Jane, psychic extraordinaire. And if I couldn't have her respect and admiration, then that just made me more desperate to feed my ego off the crowd. Everyone else couldn't stop telling me how amazing I was, and I wanted that more than I wanted my wife's honesty. I started chasing women. I never slept with any of them, but I seduced anything with a nice pair of legs - young, old, married, single, it didn't matter as long as I got that look out of them, the one that told me all I had to do was say the word and they'd be mine. I wasn't vulgar or direct about it of course - deniability was everything - but all it took was a touch on the arm, a tone of voice, the right kind of smile. I collected phone numbers and hotel keys like trophies, and it was a double stroke to my pride every time - first that I could have anyone I wanted, and then that I was a _good man_ because I never took them up on it. I just took that energy home and used it on my wife, so really it worked to her advantage too, didn't it? I was despicable in every way, and I thought I was the conquering hero.

"And of course we had Charlotte. I loved her from the first moment I saw her. But I was the kind of father who can't get enough of tossing the baby in the air to make her scream with laughter, but hands her over to Mom as soon as the crying starts or a diaper needs to be changed. I was the fun dad, my little girl's personal magician and storyteller. I gave her anything she wanted. But if there was a temper tantrum or a nightmare, that was Angela's job. She made the rules and I let Charlotte break every one of them, no matter what Angie said about consistency and stability. What did I know about those things? I was so determined to be the opposite of my father I ended up being just as bad. And that was when I was even around. Angela was tired and wrapped up in being a mother, and I missed her attention. I was jealous of how much my two girls loved each other, how they got from each other what I couldn't give them. So I worked more and more. If I couldn't be the star at home, well, why bother tearing myself away from my adoring fans to make it home for dinner?"

He took a breath. "I wasn't a good father, I wasn't a good husband, I wasn't a good man. And so what Red John took from me was not just my family, but any chance that I might ever get to make my failings up to them."

Lisbon stared at his profile, the downward pull of his lips and brow, and reached out to take his hand. His fingers tightened around hers. She knew she had no right to contradict him, but she couldn't stand to see his pain, either. "Jane... you make it sound like you think you were a monster to them. But what you describe - that's just normal stuff. Most everyone is that bad or worse. Lots of couples disagree about work decisions. Lots of parents regret over-indulging their kids or not spending more time at home. I believe you were immature and pig-headed and didn't have your priorities quite straight. But none of that means you were a terrible person."

His grip tightened on her hand, and a tear slid down his cheek. She could tell she wasn't getting through to him. She took a deep breath. "And whatever mistakes you made then, you aren't that man anymore. You should take credit for that. A lot of people, after losing the person they love most, they don't ever pick themselves up again. They get worse instead of better."

He turned toward her then, his eyes burning into hers. "You mean your father," he said, "but what you don't see is that I did the same thing to you he did. I hurt you in different ways than he did, but I did hurt you and use you and make you cover for my weaknesses. I know there were days you weren't sure you'd survive him, and I also know there were days you weren't sure you'd survive me. If he hadn't gotten you used to being treated that badly, you would never have put up with me."

She ripped her hand from his grasp, alight with fury. "You don't get to say that," she spat at him. "Never say that again. You're wrong. You're nothing like him. And I'm not some broken doll being passed from one owner to the next."

"I'm sorry," he said immediately. "I didn't mean that. Of course you're not. I didn't - it was a stupid thing to say."

She jerked her head in a nod of acknowledgment, and they lapsed into silence. Her temper faded almost as quickly as it had flared. She hated where the conversation had taken them, hated having to say such things, but she couldn't let it go so easily, either. "You may have abused my trust and my patience," she said, voice low, staring determinedly at the fire, "but you never abused _me. _You were - when you weren't ditching me or getting on my last nerve, you were a good friend. I was - I am glad to have you in my life."

"Oh Teresa," he said, voice almost a caress. "You're always so much kinder than I deserve."

She swallowed, determined to steer the conversation away from herself. "So... these past few months, it sounds like you were doing a lot of thinking about your marriage."

"Yes," he said. "I've been... taking stock. Trying to make sense of myself without the hunt for Red John. Without him hanging over my head. I wanted to understand all the mistakes I've made, so now that there's suddenly a life ahead of me, I won't repeat them." He paused, glanced at her and then away. "It's the first time I've been able to remember Angela and Charlotte properly. Since they died... the part of my memory palace that held them, it's had Red John's mark stamped all over it, tainting everything that came before. Now that he's dead, he's not on every wall anymore, just that one place at the end. They deserved to be remembered properly, at last."

"And did you remember the good things, as well as the bad?"

"Yes."

"I'm glad," she said.

"There were a lot of good times," he said, looking at her again. "But I wanted you to know about the rest of it, too." He held out his left hand in front of them, firelight glinting on the gold ring. "Wearing this all these years, it isn't because I still consider myself a married man, or because there isn't room for another in my heart. It's been a promise to them, to do whatever I could to right my wrongs. If I'm lucky enough to earn a woman's love again, my first marriage won't be an ideal to measure up to. It'll be a cautionary tale. If I have another chance, I want to believe that I can do better, and be better."

Lisbon didn't know why he was saying such things to her. She wondered what he would tell her if she asked that, but she knew she wasn't going to. What he'd said already seemed like too much - so much more than he'd ever given her before. She had to hand it to Jane - he didn't do anything by half measures, even if it was spilling his guts about topics that had been taboo for a decade.

She could admit that she'd never thought much about his marriage. She'd seen his grief, sharp enough to cut anyone who came near it, and the pictures of the beautiful family in the beautiful house, and let those things stand in for all the rest. But Jane was right - the man she knew him to be back then hadn't been model husband material. She had no doubt that his bone-deep guilt had him casting himself as more of a villain than he had been, but it was kind of a relief to think of them as normal people with normal problems rather than a martyred holy trinity.

She worried about all the shame he was still carrying around, though. At least he was able to talk about it now. That seemed like real progress, even if hearing it made her feel like her skin didn't fit right. But who else was he going to tell? And in her heart of hearts, she was glad it was her he was opening up to. Even if a whole weekend of this kind of intensity might cause her to spontaneously combust.

But for that moment, she just wanted her mind to stop spinning. She poured the last of the wine into their glasses and relaxed into the couch arm, pulling her feet up and resting them against his thigh. He looked down at them, and then over at her, and a slow smile spread across his face.

"That's probably enough soul-searching for one night," he said lightly. "Shall we watch a movie?"

* * *

Two hours and change later, she came out of the bathroom after brushing her teeth to find him hovering in the doorway of the master bedroom, wearing his pajamas.

"Should I sleep in the other room?" he asked. He had on that perfectly serene expression that she knew by now was meant to cover anxiousness. "I'll be fine there if you'd like some space."

She shrugged awkwardly, cheeks flushing against her will. She knew he was attempting to be respectful of her, but she wished he'd just read her mind and get on with things like he always used to. "Suit yourself," she said, unwilling to send him away or ask him to stay, and ducked back into the bathroom so she didn't have to watch whatever he did next.

When she reemerged, he was tucked into the far side of the bed, reading a book. She supposed he'd gotten used to sleeping near her. She supposed she'd gotten used to it, too. That was going to be a real problem if she ever started dating again.

That train of thought didn't go anywhere she wanted to visit, so she cut it off and climbed into bed, checking her phone for messages before plugging it in on the nightstand.

She looked up to find him looking back at her with a soft look on his face. "Goodnight, Teresa" he said.

"Goodnight, Jane."

She fell asleep listening to him breathe.


	5. Chapter 5

V. The Second Confession

They slept in the next morning, then had a leisurely breakfast on the deck, enjoying the view of waves breaking against the beach below. Patrick was pleased with the progress he'd made thus far. Discussing his family with Lisbon had been painful, but not impossibly so, and though he'd done it because they were things she needed to hear, the conversation had brought him an unexpected measure of peace. Being truly known by Teresa was something he feared almost as much as he craved it, and having had a taste of it, he was delighted to find that the reward thus far outweighed the risk. She truly was a pearl among women, and though he was grossly undeserving of her, now that she was almost within his grasp, he was never going to give her up.

After they finished eating, they went out for a walk along the path atop the bluffs.

"Are we still in the Zone of Truth out here?" Lisbon asked him teasingly as they strolled, "Or does your promise only apply indoors?"

He smiled at her, pleased she'd taken his vow seriously enough to care about its limitations. "I think it will be easier for me to not worry about switching back and forth," he told her. "Though if you'd like me to come up with a few fibs out here just so you don't think I've been replaced by an alien body-snatcher, I'm happy to oblige."

"No need, consider yourself under oath," she said happily, and proceeded to pepper him with questions for the duration of their walk - his favorite color, favorite ice cream flavor, first kiss, first magic trick, best birthday present. He played along, more than willing to indulge her curiosity, occasionally turning the question back on her when the impulse struck.

It was a cold, clear day, with a few tall clouds like proud white battleships scudding across the pale blue sky. A brisk, salty wind came off the ocean, and though they wore sweaters under their parkas, it nipped at their hands and cheeks, and blew Lisbon's hair around something fierce. They paused to admire the view at the rocky point at the far end of the bay, where the waves crashed against the granite outcroppings, sending spray up so high they could taste it. A lone, gnarled pine tree grew up from a crack in the rocks, surviving against all odds.

After a few minutes, the chill set in and they turned back, passing another couple headed in the opposite direction. It was jarring to see them - Jane had been so caught up in their private little bubble that it was hard to remember other people existed at all.

They were quieter on the return, but Lisbon looked at ease, and he was glad to see this side of her - they'd traveled all over the state together on cases, but she'd always been the indomitable Agent Lisbon then, carrying the full authority of the State of California on her shoulders with every step. In all the years he'd known her, she'd almost never taken a real vacation, beyond a few days with her brothers that found her more stressed upon her return than she'd been when she left. Even when his hijinks had landed her on suspension, she hadn't used the time off to have any fun. But here, now, she was just Teresa, and he resolved to take her away for little weekend excursions - or real proper holidays - as often as she'd let him.

Back at the house, he fixed them hot cocoa to warm up, and delivered her mug to her on the couch. He took a sip of his own drink and tried to calm his nerves. It was time to dive back in, but he found himself reluctant to darken their mood. _It won't be as hard as last night,_ he told himself. And even if it was, he had to do it anyway. It was part of the plan, and it was what she deserved. If he failed these tests he had set for himself, he would know he wasn't ready to offer himself to her.

"So, Saint Teresa," he said with more lightness than he felt, "will you hear my next confession?"

She gave him a sharp look over the rim of her mug, trying to determine if he was mocking her religion, then visibly decided to give him a pass. "I suppose," she said with some trepidation, and he knew these murky waters were at least as unsettling for her as they were for him. But the two of them were never going to get anywhere by sticking to their typical playbook of avoidance and deflection, so mutual discomfort it would be.

"In cataloging my mistakes and misdeeds," he began, positioning himself toward her on the couch but not quite looking her in the face, "it was impossible not to notice that over the last decade, the person I've wronged most often and most grievously is you. I want to acknowledge that, and apologize for it, and to tell you that I intend to cause you less misery in the future. But because this apology is for you, I thought I'd give you some choices. I've compiled a list of what I believe are the hundred worst things I've ever done to you, which I am happy to apologize for and discuss individually either in their entirety or up to the number of your choosing. Alternately, you can set out the list of offenses for which you'd like me to make amends yourself. Or if you don't want to get into particulars, I can cut it down to a summary of the major areas in which I've failed you and work from there."

Lisbon stared helplessly back at him, looking trapped. "What if I don't want an apology?" she asked.

"You need one," he said. "If I don't acknowledge what I've done wrong, and why it was wrong, then how can you ever believe I'll behave any differently in the future?"

"I'm not sure I'd believe it anyway, at least until I see it with my own eyes," she grumbled.

"But I want to apologize to you," he said. "I think it's important for me. Do you really want to stand in the way of my psychological progress? Besides, there must have been a thousand times over the years you felt you were due an apology from me and didn't get one. This is your big chance!"

"That was before," she said, eyeing her cocoa.

She meant before McAllister's death, he understood. It broke his heart a little that she felt one compromise - radical as it had been - could even the score for all the suffering he'd inflicted on her. "Even so," he said, "will you indulge me?"

"Fine," she said. "But give me the short version."

That was what he'd predicted. He was a bit disappointed to not get to use his hundred hand-crafted apologies, but they would have taken all day. Perhaps he could do something else with them - write them all down, fold them into flowers, and leave them hung on a wire tree in her bedroom, so when he pissed her off in the future she could have his contrition available to her at any time.

"As you wish," he said, and picked up her hand. "I'm sorry for repeatedly abandoning you. From ditching you at a crime scene to running off to Vegas for six months without telling you what was going on. I know it hurt you, and undermined our relationship and ability to work together. I made you feel like you didn't matter to me, or that you were just an obstacle for me to get around. I made it almost impossible for you to rely on me as your partner. I put my own agenda ahead of everything else, including your feelings and your ability to effectively do your job. Part of that agenda, especially when Red John was involved, was to keep you safe, but in most cases I think I could have found a better way."

Lisbon pulled her hand back. "A few months ago you told me you were right to leave me on that beach on the way to Malibu. Is that still how you feel?"

"I go back and forth on that one," he admitted. "I do think the risk to your life was unacceptably high. But it's also occurred to me that if you had been there, keeping tabs from outside the range of McAllister's concussion bomb, you could very well have stopped him that night and prevented all the chaos that came after. On the other hand, if you'd come in early, like you did with Dumar Tanner, you would likely have ended up dead. It was a bit of an impasse, my dear - I was afraid you would value my life too much to let everything play out as it needed to, and I valued your life too much to gamble it on such uncertain odds. I knew I wouldn't be fully in control of the situation."

"That's why we have this little thing called 'back-up,'" she said. "If you'd wanted to get the job done right and minimize risk, you wouldn't just have brought me, you would have brought the whole team. But then you wouldn't have had Red John all to yourself. That's what you _really_ weren't willing to risk, let's be honest."

"That wasn't all of it, but it was certainly part of it," he admitted. "And I'm apologizing for that too. I clung to my fantasy of one-on-one revenge too tightly for too long. In the end, it was an impediment to stopping McAllister, which should have been the primary goal. And it led me to treat you badly. But… I look back on myself then, and I can't see how or when I might have changed. That thorn was in me too deeply to be pulled out."

"But you did change your mind."

He shrugged. "I had a moment of clarity and finally escaped my myopia to see the bigger picture. It happened when I nearly broke my teacup at the CBI, actually. But that was just luck, really - the right trigger at the right moment. I give myself very little credit for that particular moment of personal growth."

"I don't think that's right," she said slowly. "I think your moment of clarity could never have happened if you hadn't already changed. You must have been near a crossroads, and then you got a little push. But if you hadn't been most of the way there on your own, it wouldn't have made a difference."

"Perhaps you're right," he said. "But we've strayed a bit from the apology. I'm sorry for having disappeared on you all those times, and I'm not going to do that in the future."

"Really?" she cocked a skeptical eyebrow at him. "Just like that? You're going to suddenly be Mr. Dependable and stay right where you're supposed to be?"

He sighed. "I'm not going to report every move I make to you. But I promise to communicate more before taking off for any length of time or if you have a reasonable expectation that I'll be somewhere specific."

"What does 'any length of time' mean?"

"How about this - if we're together, I'll tell you before leaving unless it's a matter of extreme urgency, I will try to warn you in advance if I won't be able to meet you at an agreed-upon time, and if I do head off on my own for a while, I will make every effort to contact you within twenty-four hours so you know I'm not kidnapped or dead."

"Really?" she asked again.

"Really," he assured her. He knew she wasn't yet convinced, but he also knew that nothing he could say would fully persuade her, and trying too hard could backfire and make her more suspicious.

"The next thing I'd like to apologize for is my dishonesty," he said instead. "I have habitually kept you in the dark regarding my thinking about cases and my plans, and frequently lied to your face when it suited my purposes. On a personal level, I've blocked you out, refusing to share my thoughts and feelings. I know it hurt you. I made you feel like you were just a mark, someone to be manipulated instead of trusted. I do trust you, though, more than I've ever trusted anyone. But for a very long time, I didn't want anyone to get close to me. I was a broken, twisted man, full of hate and pain and thirst for vengeance. I didn't want you to see that. I wanted to impress you, to give you the magic act and pretend everything else didn't exist. And beyond that, I don't - really know how to be a normal person. I play games, I trick people, I lie more easily than I tell the truth. But I want you to trust me, and I want to be more honest with you. I'm going to make an effort to tell you what I'm thinking more, and to involve you more in planning my tricks rather than just springing them on you. And I'm probably not going to be as good at that as we might both hope, so I want you to ask me when you want to know what I'm up to."

"I've asked you that plenty over the years, and it's rarely done me a bit of good," she pointed out.

"I know," he said. "This change in particular is going to take some work. I'm not going to promise never to lie to you or keep things from you - I don't think I'm capable of it and frankly it wouldn't be any fun. But I will be more open with you, and I want you to be able to trust me when it really matters. So how about this - we'll have a code phrase, and when you say it, I'll answer your question honestly, no matter what. I mean, unless doing so would pose an imminent danger to someone's life because I know a criminal is listening to us or something."

"And I can use the code phrase whenever I want?"

He shrugged. "Sure. I mean, if you use it twenty times a day, its effectiveness might get a bit diluted, but do what you need to do."

"So you're giving me a safe word."

He grimaced in distaste. "I'm not crazy about comparing surprising you with a clever plan to whipping you until you beg for mercy, but I suppose the underlying concept is similar."

She laughed. "So what's my 'code phrase' then?"

"You can choose. You're the one who's going to have to say it."

"All right. I'll think about it and get back to you."

"Very good. Moving on, the last thing I want to apologize for is making you bear so many of the consequences for my actions. For years, I did what I pleased and left you to clean up the mess. My behavior cost you career advancement, endless hours of paperwork, humiliating apologies, and damaged your reputation with your colleagues and supervisors. I caused you chronic stress, which took a toll on everything from your sleep to your personal life-"

"My personal life?" she interrupted. "What do you mean by that?"

"I mean, I was a significant impediment to you having one at all," he elaborated. "Hard to go out and have a drink with a friend when you're stuck filling out complaint forms at the office until ten at night."

"Believe me," she said, "my tendency to be a workaholic and use that as an excuse to avoid personal entanglements long predates you."

"I know," he replied, "but I certainly pushed you further in that direction rather than giving you an opportunity to do anything different. I put a great many burdens on your shoulders, and the fact that you were strong and forgiving enough to bear them doesn't make that all right. I'm sorry. I should have cared more about your wellbeing. I should have made some slight effort to make your life better instead of worse, instead of just throwing you a kind gesture whenever you got to the end of your rope or stepping in when you were actually losing your job. I was a bad friend to you as well as a bad partner. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I think a part of me wanted you to be as trapped and miserable as I was, because that felt like being close to you. But I don't want that anymore. I want you to be happy and have the things you want in life. And I promise to do my best to help you get them instead of shoving them out of your reach. I'm sure I'll still be a pain in your ass, but I won't ignore the consequences my actions have for you, and I will make sure that on balance, I do you more good than harm."

"Thank you," she said. "But I have to be responsible for my own happiness. I don't want you to start manipulating me for my own good because you think you know what's best for me."

"I understand," he said, because that was true, whether or not he intended to exactly go along with her wishes. "So, that was the short version of my apology. But I'd like you to think about whether there's anything important I've left out, either general or specific. I'm very willing to grovel upon command."

She turned her head to stare out the window for a minute, and he took a swallow of his cold cocoa.

"No," she said at last. "I don't need anymore apologies. But thank you for the ones you gave me. I accept them." She caught his eyes. "Are there any apologies you need from me?"

"No, of course not," he said. "But I'm touched that you'd ask."

She frowned. "Are you sure?" she demanded. "You're acting like everything that went wrong in the last decade is your fault and I was some innocent bystander. But that's not true. It was both of us there together the whole time. I didn't always do the right thing. I wasn't always honest with you, either, and I didn't always believe you when I should have."

"It's fine, Teresa. I know I didn't make it easy to trust me. You have nothing to apologize for."

She took a deep breath. "What about killing McAllister?" she asked. "Do you resent me for taking that from you? I'm not sorry I did it, but I know it must have been hard for you."

"You know how much I wanted to be the one who killed him," he said slowly, wanting to get it right. "And if I had, I have no doubt at all I would have found it intensely satisfying and never felt a shred of regret for it. But… in the end, other things mattered more. I made that choice, and I still feel it was the right one. It was enough for me to witness his last moments, and to know that I orchestrated them even if I didn't pull the trigger. And if someone other than me had to be the one to do it, I'm glad it was you. In my better moments, I think that Angela and Charlotte would have preferred that it played out this way. And if I mean to tell myself that I did everything I did for them, then that has to count for something."

Lisbon looked terribly relieved, and he wondered how much that had been weighing on her. It seemed the whole communication thing did have some benefits. But probably that was enough of it for one morning.

"Are you hungry yet?" he asked. "I thought I might fix us something to eat."

"Thank God," she said quickly. "Yes, please."

"Lunch it is," he said, and hopped up from the couch, dropping a kiss onto the top of her head as he passed behind her, leaving her to stare in startlement behind him.


	6. Chapter 6

VI. The Third Confession

"I once said that you didn't know what you meant to me," Jane began later that afternoon. They were sitting on the damned couch again, armed with hot toddies. After lunch they'd gone down to the beach and flown kites - Lisbon didn't think she'd done anything of the sort since her mother was alive - but now they were back at the house, dinner was in the oven, and Jane was about to drop some new emotional bomb on her.

"I remember," she said sourly. "It was right before you stole my phone and left me at the side of the road, thus demonstrating I meant about as much to you as a used sandwich wrapper."

"And how could you have known?" he continued, ignoring her interruption. "After all, I never told you. But you should know, so I'm going to tell you. I have to start before we met. After McAllister killed my family, I had a breakdown. I couldn't live with the pain I was in, so I tried to escape it. I couldn't work anymore, obviously, I had no real friends and no family, so there were no distractions from my guilt and rage and self-loathing. I drank. I took pills. It was self-destructive, but it wasn't exactly suicidal until one day it was. I took a bottle of Vicodin and washed it down with a bottle of vodka. It was the vodka that saved my life - I threw most of it back up. My housekeeper found me a few hours later and called an ambulance, and then it was straight from the emergency room to the locked ward. Sophie Miller came into my life then, and over time she helped me accept… being alive. Working with her, I was able to face what had happened and think about what came next. I told her I wanted to honor my family's memory and make peace with their deaths. I knew that would go down better than telling her I wanted to hunt down their murderer and torture him to death. So I got out. And then… I met you.

"I wasn't really… a human being then. I was a hollow shell walking around impersonating a man. I couldn't be what I had been anymore, and I had no idea who or what to become instead. Eighty percent of the time, nothing in the world felt real, like I was just walking around a shoddy set made of paper mache and plywood, and the rest of the time I was a live wire, the intensity ratcheted up so high I was bowled over by the taste of an apple or light through the leaves of a tree. Everyone around me treated me with pitying kid gloves or else with a rubber-necking voyeurism that made me want to scratch my own skin off.

"Except you. You treated me like a person. You told me to clean myself up. And… I did. You showed me that I could be useful. That the talents I'd used to turn myself into a walking lie could do some good. But more than that, you were… you. A kind of person I'd never known before. Honest, but not a fool. A woman of integrity, strength, and courage, selflessly devoted to justice and service. I felt I knew you the first day we met, but you kept on surprising me, over and over. And I found myself… not wanting to disappoint you. Instead, I wanted to impress you. That sounds like a little, petty thing, but it was the only thing I'd wanted other than death - Red John's or mine or both - in what felt like forever. It drew me back into the world of the living. I can't tell you how many days the only moments that mattered to me were the ones when I could elicit some reaction from you. For you, I could be a showman without being a fraud. And that gave me a path forward. A way to live with myself. Without even meaning to, I became a new Patrick Jane because of you. In response to you.

"And I'm so glad that happened. When I think about all the different paths I could have taken back then, almost all of them end with my vendetta getting me killed or turning me into a monster. But you saved me. Red John tried to make me into his playmate, but you came along and made me into your partner instead. And I want to truly thank you for that."

Lisbon had listened as long as she could. She put her drink down and seized both of his hands in hers. "You listen to me, Patrick Jane," she said. "You were born with a good heart and you'll have one until the day you die. The world tried to beat it out of you from the time you were a child, and nothing could. I do believe you could well have murdered Red John or gotten yourself killed trying, but I don't for a second imagine that you could ever have become like him. It's not in you. And that's not because of me. Maybe you were lost, and maybe I helped you find a version of yourself you could grow into. But being lost didn't mean there was nothing in you to start with. It just meant you were in too much pain to see what was already there. I see you, though, I have all along. And you were never half as bad as you seem to think. I know McAllister made you feel responsible for his crimes and poisoned you against yourself, but that's just a trick. What's real is the person I work with every day, and he's a good man."

"You should know better," he said sadly. "You know what I've done. I buried a man alive, and then got him killed by putting him on a fake suspect list for crimes I knew he didn't commit."

She shook her head. "I admit your sense of justice runs more 'an eye for an eye' than mine does. But Marx was a sadistic murderer. You wouldn't have done that to someone innocent."

"I like to think that too," he said, "but what if it's not true? If I'd needed to do it to catch Red John, are you sure I wouldn't have crossed that line?"

"You needed Dumar Tanner alive to catch Red John," Lisbon said sharply. "But you killed him to save me. And you obviously have a few qualms about what you did to Marx, or you wouldn't be mentioning it now. You're not a sociopath. You have a conscience and you have empathy for other people - until they cross what you see as a bright moral line. I can't believe I have to tell you this, you're supposed to be a smart guy."

Jane smiled ruefully. "We all have our blind spots," he said.

A timer dinged in the kitchen then, and he jumped up to tend to their dinner.

It was only when he dropped her hands that she realized he'd been holding them all that time. She rubbed them against her thighs, then got off the couch and wandered over to the windows. The sky was streaked with orange as the sun approached the horizon, the gaudy light glazing the surface of the ocean with melting brilliance. Even with the dramatic panorama spread out before her, she felt claustrophobic, as if the house was shrinking around her, barely leaving space to take a breath. This newly open Jane was doing a number on her. Things were changing too fast, and she didn't like the sensation of being swept away to an unknown destination. Or - maybe not so unknown. She was beginning to see where he was taking her, like a hunter driving a stampeding animal into a box canyon. She could already feel the walls narrowing, and she didn't know if there was a way out without breaking something. Possibly him.

He returned from the kitchen and came to stand beside her. After observing the sunset for a long moment, he said, "I just want to finish what I was trying to say before you so gallantly decided to defend me from myself. Whatever you may say, I have no doubt that I'm a better person because I know you. You're the most important person in the world to me, and I'm so grateful every day to have you in my life."

Her cheeks flushed with pleased discomfort. She opened her mouth to say tell him he was important to her too, but he interrupted before she could start. "You don't have to say anything back," he told her. "I just want you to know that."

She turned to face him, eyes narrowing. "What do you mean, I don't have to say anything? You mean I don't have a line in the script here?"

"What are you talking about?" he said, appearing genuinely confused, as if that meant anything.

"It's obvious you've thought through what you've been telling me in advance," she said. "Planned it all out. And no doubt you also predicted what my response to your confessions would be and planned for that, too. So tell me, how am I doing so far? Have I been getting my lines right?"

He physically backed away from her ire. "It's not like that," he said. "Yes, of course I planned what to say to you. I wanted to communicate clearly and not get muddled up. And of course I thought about how you might interpret it, so I could try to avoid misunderstandings. But I'm not angling to get you to say or do anything specific."

"Of course you are," she said. "You said you were going to talk to me about four things, right? Well, we're at three now, so you're almost done laying the groundwork, and tomorrow you spring the trap."

"There's no _trap_," he said, his own temper clearly rising. "If I was trying to manipulate you into something, don't you think I'd be a little less obvious about it? I'm being about as subtle as a ton of bricks, here."

"That's because you're trying to make it not look like a trap so I won't feel like a giant dupe when I fall right into it!"

"You're free to leave at any time," he told her coldly. "I'll drive you home right now if you want to cut this short. But what you're feeling right now isn't about what I'm doing, it's about you. I've been nothing but honest with you, and I've made no demands on you. That's not going to change if you stick around. I'll tell you another true thing tomorrow without asking you for anything in return, and if you want to know what my expert prediction is for your response, it's that you'll tell me you need some time to think, which I will happily give you, because I'm not trying to control you. I'm trying to give you information you didn't previously have so you can decide what you want for yourself with all the relevant facts at your disposal."

"Relevant facts that you think will make me decide what you want me to," she said accusingly.

"That's not a nefarious agenda, that's just how conversations work," he explained wearily. "Let's say we're talking about the upcoming city council election, and you haven't thought about it yet or decided who to vote for. If I tell you which candidate I like and why, of course I'm hoping you'll see things my way and vote for my guy. That doesn't mean I'm cheating or manipulating you, or that I'm scheming to give you a phony ballot to steal your vote, it's just _talking._"

"Fine," she said furiously, realizing he had a point. "But I don't like playing games when I don't know the rules."

"There's only one rule and I told you before we started. I have to tell you the truth. That's it. That's the whole game." He sighed, looking defeated. "But it still doesn't work if you don't want to play. Look, maybe this is too much, too fast. We don't have to finish this if you don't want to. Would you rather go back to Sacramento tonight?"

She shook her head mutely, not sure what she was feeling but pretty sure she didn't want an escape hatch. She didn't need to run away from him, she just wanted to be on even ground.

He ran a hand through his hair. "Then do you want to table any further serious conversations for the time being, and just have a relaxing day off tomorrow? I don't want to force anything on you. If this is enough already, then I'll lay off."

She could tell the offer was genuine, which was obscurely irritating because if he wasn't even trying to goad her into accepting his challenge, she couldn't turn him down just to spite him. But she knew there wasn't any point in shutting him up. If he didn't say what he wanted to now, she'd just be thinking about it all the time, and things would be awkward until he finally spit it out. It wouldn't be good for either of them.

"It's all right," she said. "You can tell me whatever it is tomorrow. Just - no more for tonight, okay?"

He flashed a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Never fear, I was done anyway."

With that, he removed himself to the kitchen and didn't reemerge until dinner was ready.

They were quiet over the meal. She tried to make conversation, feeling she'd gotten herself into the wrong and wanting to make it up to him, but he was lost in thought, offering a polite comment or small smile in response to her overtures before lapsing back into silence.

Afterward, they read books in the living room before turning in early. Before switching off the lights, she checked her phone by force of habit, then glanced over to find him watching her from the other side of the bed with a wistful, troubled look on his face.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked.

"The different ways you can want something," he said. When she raised her brows in question, he continued, "sometimes when you want something you just want it - like a cup of tea. And sometimes you want it but you're afraid of actually having it - like a pet tiger."

"And what is it you want at the moment?" she asked before realizing how incendiary the question might be.

He just turned a frank look back at her, the answer obvious in his face.

"And am I a cup of tea or a pet tiger?" she couldn't help but ask.

He gave her a wicked smile. "Oh, you're much more dangerous than a tiger, my dear. A tiger needs five inch claws to dismantle me - you could do it with a handful of words."

She frowned. "What words would those be?"

He shrugged easily, but there was real fear in his eyes. "I'm sure there are plenty of choices, but just something like, 'leave and never come back' would probably do it."

She softened immediately. "I'd never say that to you," she assured him. "That's the last thing I want."

"I'm glad," he said simply, but the worry didn't leave his face.

She wondered then if whatever he was planning to tell her was something quite different than what she'd inferred. Between the things he'd chosen to reveal already and what he'd said about being obvious, there wasn't a lot of mystery left. Unless, of course, it was all just a clever misdirection to soften her up before admitting that he had a storage unit full of antique teddy bears he wanted to move into her apartment. Or that he needed her to give him an alibi for a recent string of burglaries. With Jane, you could never know for sure.

Still, she could see that even if her original supposition was correct, her little scene before dinner might have spooked him a bit. She hadn't exactly been encouraging. And, if she was being honest with herself, she wasn't sure how encouraging she wanted to be.

It wasn't as if she'd never considered… But considering and acting were very different beasts. Imagining certain things while Jane was entirely out of reach, walled off behind a murderous obsession and a wedding ring, had been safe. It asked nothing of her, at least nothing but a willingness to sacrifice her career and possibly her life for him. But now the obsession had been laid to rest and the wedding ring turned out to not mean quite what she'd thought, and Jane was rocking their comfortable little boat, and she wasn't sure if she liked it. Still, when he'd given her an out, she hadn't taken it. She would hear what he had to say, and then she would… deal with it.

She wasn't about to tempt fate or Jane's affinity for mayhem by claiming nothing could drive her away from him, but she wanted to offer him some reassurance.

"You should know... you don't have to change in order to make my life better," she said. "You already do that. I wouldn't trade you for anything. We'll be all right." She had no evidence of the last part, but that didn't matter. It had to be true, so she would make it be true, no matter what happened tomorrow.

His voice was finally warmer when he said, "Good night, my dear."

She turned out the lights.


	7. Chapter 7

VII. The Fourth Confession

Jane woke first in the morning, as he usually did, and slipped out of bed to fix himself some tea. The world outside the windows had disappeared - where their view of the ocean had been, there was just pale gray fog. Visibility must be all of about five feet. It seemed like a bad omen. He'd rented this particular house with the notion of making his declaration out on the deck, in the sunshine, with the coast spread out before them in all its glory. He didn't imagine Teresa was fickle enough that the weather would dictate her response, but he did feel he could use all the help he could get.

He knew he shouldn't feel too discouraged by her fit of temper the previous evening. It had been almost inevitable that her uncertainty would lead to a blow up at some point, and if it had to be sometime, he was glad it had been yesterday and not today. And she hadn't demanded to go home or even kicked him out of the bed, although she clearly knew, or at least strongly suspected, what he was about. She was, if nothing else, curious enough to hear him out.

He went through the familiar motions of preparing his Earl Grey while reflecting on what he'd seen in her so far. He knew the accuracy of his readings declined when he was highly emotionally invested in the situation, but he would work with what he had. He knew she hadn't entirely ruled out becoming involved with him. She wasn't a cruel woman, and if she'd seen where he was headed and knew she could never return his feelings, she would have made that clear before allowing him to make a scene that would surely embarrass both of them. At the same time, she wasn't exactly eagerly awaiting his profession, either.

He suspected she herself wasn't sure where she stood, and was waiting to see what he said and how she reacted to it before making up her mind. Well, that was hardly unexpected. She was averse to change of almost any kind, and what he was proposing would, in some senses, radically alter every aspect of her life. Of course, in another way, it would make almost no difference at all in their daily routines, except of course for what exactly they did in the bed they both already slept in.

He knew he wasn't exactly a safe bet. He had a history of making her life quite a bit more difficult, not to mention his periodic disappearing acts and the entire barge's worth of baggage he towed along behind him. Besides which, if things went wrong between them, it stood to cost her both the smooth functioning of her team at work and her best friend.

He wondered, again, if he was making the wrong choice. If he should just leave well enough alone, and let her get on with her life, and enjoy the not-insignificant role she had already allotted to him. Maybe he really was being utterly selfish by trying to bind her more closely to the walking disaster that was Patrick Jane.

But he'd promised her a fourth confession, and she had agreed to hear it, and so she would. If he was a better man, he would resolve to say his piece, let her make her decision, and then live with it whether it was yes or no. But he knew himself well enough to know he would never be able to give up on her. _No dirty tricks, though,_ he told himself sternly, determined to abide by that at least. Not because of his own scruples, but because if she caught him conning her about this, he might lose his chance forever. Everything he did had to be - if not on the level - at least in plain view.

Patrick Jane sipped his tea and pondered his fate.

* * *

He'd manufactured a relaxing morning through sheer force of will. He knew that after their conversation, the chances of laid back vacation activities were approximately zero, and he wanted her to enjoy the weekend as much as possible. So he'd fixed them a sumptuous breakfast, chatted his way through it without allowing a hint of tension between them, and then insisted on curling up at opposite ends of the couch to watch a heist movie. He critiqued the criminals, she critiqued the police who pursued them, and a good time was had by all.

He'd hoped the weather would clear by the time the DVD was over, so he could propose another walk, but the fog had barely lifted at all - now the nearest trees were just barely visible, dark skeletal branches veiled by rolling tendrils of ghostly vapor - and even he had to admit that strolling along a cliff-edge in such poor visibility was hardly an appealing prospect.

As the credits rolled, he considered checking the disk's special features just as a delaying tactic, but before he could suggest it, Lisbon grabbed the remote control and hit the power button. An abrupt silence fell.

"So… do you want to talk?" she asked, looking anxious but determined.

"Yes. Sure. Let me just - grab a glass of water," he said, and fled to the kitchen, feeling like he might throw up. Pre-show nerves were hardly new to him, though he couldn't remember the last time he'd had it this bad. Still, he knew what to do. He took some deep breaths and got his body under control. He retrieved a glass from the cupboard, filled it, and took a long swallow. Then he went back to face her.

"We don't have to do this," she said to him at once, that little line between her eyebrows so deep it looked painful, "if you don't want to."

"I do want to," he assured her, "I'm just, um, pretty terrified right now." He dropped down onto what had become his side of the couch, setting his glass down on the coffee table. "I've been terrified for a long time actually. Because the truth is that I'm in love with you, and it scares the daylights out of me. For years I didn't even let myself see it. I hid it away in the dark," he said, finding that once he'd opened his mouth it had run away with him, and he had no idea how to get it back under control. He didn't know if he even _wanted _it under control - there was a giddy relief in just letting this deepest of all truths spill out freely. "I was twisted up inside, my crippling fear of being close to you outmatched only by my crippling fear of losing you. I knew that getting involved with a woman while Red John was stalking me would be to hand her a death sentence, and that was such a good excuse to protect myself from having to feel anything again, from having to even try to move on with my life or entertaining anything that might interfere with my vendetta. But I needed you so much. I needed your help with the case and I needed you because being near you made me stop wishing I was dead, so I played terrible games with you. I reeled you in and pushed you away, I gave you glimpses of my feelings and snatched them back, I made you promises I couldn't keep. I never wanted to hurt you, but I hurt you all the time. I know that, and I'm sorry for it, and I don't want to do it anymore. I want to be honest with you, and I want to be _with_ you. In every way, for as long as you'll let me. I love you, Teresa Lisbon. You're my sun and my stars, and I want to spend every day trying to make you as happy as you make me just by existing."

He was smiling, euphoric with the release of saying it out loud, with having everything out in the open, but when he registered the look on her face, it brought him back down to earth. She looked stunned, and not in a delighted, swept-off-her-feet kind of way. There was a tear in the corner of her eye.

He began to reach for her hands, then thought better of it. "Teresa?" he asked. "Are you all right? This can't have been that much of a surprise, can it?"

She shook her head, the tear dislodging itself. She rubbed it impatiently from her cheek. "No - I - I thought you might say something like this," she admitted. "I just - didn't think it would be like _that_."

"Like what?" he asked gently.

"Like you really meant it," she said so softly he could barely hear.

"Of course I mean it, darling," he said, struggling to decode her response. Ahah. "You thought perhaps after everything that happened, I woke up one day wanting to move on with my life, or in need of a new project to focus my energy on, and you just happened to conveniently be right in front of me, an easy target for my next fixation? Or that I'd mistakenly confused my affection for you as a partner and friend with something else?"

She shrugged. "Something like that."

"I'm afraid that's not the case. I wouldn't have brought you here and done all this if I'd been in any doubt about the nature and depth of my feelings for you."

"How can you be sure?"

He offered her a smile. "I wasn't, right away. When I first realized I was in love with you, I questioned myself. I thought if it were true, surely I would have known earlier, and believe me, it took me entirely by surprise. But really all the pieces were there all along, I just hadn't let myself put them together. And when I looked inside my mind, there could be no doubt. I wish you could see what my love looks like. It's the loveliest thing that's ever been part of me. It lights me up and gives me hope for myself, because if I can feel that for you, I don't think I can be irreparably broken. I know what love is like, and I promise, I'm not at all confused about this."

She squared her shoulders. "You make it sound easy," she said, almost a complaint.

"No," he said. "Not that. I said I had no doubts about what I feel, but I had plenty of doubts about what if anything I should do. I know what I am, and I know you deserve better. I thought for a long time about whether I should stand aside and let you find some decent, honest, dependable man to fall in love with, someone as good as you are. But then I thought, if he's that much like you, he'd probably take you for granted. He'd just expect the people around him to be as wonderful as he was, and wouldn't appreciate you as much as I do. And if something or someone was getting in your way, he'd probably give you very honorable advice, and try to help you within the bounds of fair play and legality, and if that didn't solve your problem, then he'd just let you live with it. Whereas I have no scruples about doing anything it takes to ensure your wellbeing, regardless of professional codes of conduct or whatever it is people like you use to limit yourselves. So ultimately, even though I'm less worthy of you, you'd be better off with me than with Mr. Decency, because there's no way anyone else could love you more than I do or be more devoted to making sure you have everything you want for the rest of your life."

"And that was your only doubt?" she asked skeptically. "Other than that, you don't think there are any potential problems with us getting involved?"

He considered how to answer. "From my point of view, that was the biggest one. The next was whether I would really be able to give you what you need. But I worried less about that, because I think most of the changes you need me to make are things I want to do anyway. I told you about some of them yesterday. I plan to be more honest with you, and to give you more control of what I can keep from you and what I can't. And I'm not going to disappear on you like I used to. And I want to do whatever I can to make your life better. But those things hold true regardless of what you decide our relationship should be going forward. I'm sure it won't all go smoothly. There will be times when I panic and retreat from you, or overstep and make you want to strangle me, but I believe we can muddle through those issues as they arise, and over time we'll find out what works for both of us. "

"And did you wonder if I'd be able to give you what you need?" she asked, folding her arms around herself.

"Not really," he admitted. "You've already demonstrated you can tolerate my presence in your life outside of work. Our domestic habits are compatible. We know each other very well. And while you don't have a recent history of romantic commitment, I have no doubts about your faithfulness, and if once we were together you got cold feet or felt overwhelmed and ran for the hills, then that would just give me a chance to seduce you all over again. You know how persistent I am when I really want something. I'm happy to be certain enough for both of us until you find your footing."

"So you're saying that if I agree to this now, I'm stuck with you, and you won't let me change my mind?"

"I would never try to force you into a relationship you didn't want. But you would have to convince me you truly didn't want it and weren't just afraid or trying to avoid dealing with a fixable problem. Because if I had you, I wouldn't let you go without a fight."

"Okay..." she said. "So what are you asking me for exactly?"

"To think about whether you might be interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with me, and if so, on what terms."

"Terms?"

"I don't want to pressure you or make you feel uncomfortable. We can take it as slow as you want, but you have to tell me how slow that is. I'm happy to get out of your place and give you whatever space you need. We can just... agree to go out for a coffee next week and see where it goes from there, if that seems like it would be your speed."

Her face scrunched up. "So you're telling me that you're in love with me and want to make me happy for the rest of my life, and are therefore proposing to move out of my apartment and buy me a coffee next week?"

"Well, it seemed a bit soon for the other type of proposal," he told her with a wry smile. "I just don't want to overwhelm you. I know I can be a bit much, and that I've given you a lot to think about. Believe me, if you want to take me to bed right now and add me to your lease tomorrow, I'll have no complaints. But I can be patient, too."

"Sure you can," she said derisively.

He picked up her hand and pressed a quick kiss to it. "My dear, you are very much worth waiting for." She flushed and pulled her hand back. "But for now," he said, "let's talk about your other objections."

"My other objections?"

"Certainly. I'm sure by now you've had time to come up with all sorts of reasons why it would be a mistake for us to get involved, and I'd very much like to hear them."

She looked adorably lost. "I..."

"That's all right, if you aren't sure where to start I can get the ball rolling. We should probably talk about the sex problem."

"What sex problem?" she asked, alarmed.

"There isn't one really," he said, "but it might occur to you, when you get around to thinking about it, that sex would change the balance of power within our relationship. You're well aware that I'm an expert at reading people's physical and emotional cues and prompting particular reactions, and you must have wondered at some point how that would translate in the bedroom. It's only natural, I've had those types of thoughts about you. Now, you're a beautiful, sexually confident woman who hasn't been on the market for a serious relationship lately, meaning that in your recent encounters with men, they've almost certainly wanted more from you than you wanted from them. This gives you the power in the relationship, such as it it, and you like it that way. Whereas you might imagine that my particular skill set would give me an unfair advantage when it came to sex. That it would give me a power over you that you didn't have over me. And I want you to know that wouldn't be true."

"It wouldn't," she repeated questioningly, a slight flush coloring her face.

"No. Being able to do what I do certainly has perks in that department, and I very much look forward to demonstrating them if you allow me, but that's not what will make the sex we have amazing."

She laughed. "Confident, are we?"

"Very," he said with a shark-like smile. Then he gave her a self-deprecating shrug. "Look, before I got together with Angela, I slept around quite a bit. I was a lonely, horny teenage boy with good looks and professional training in how to get people to give me what I wanted - it was bound to happen. I wanted to be good in bed, and my strategy was to seek out a wide array of partners and learn to satisfy them. I was a bit of a romantic, and I had this notion that if I got in enough practice, when I met the right girl I'd be able to blow her mind and steal her heart forever. And then Angela happened, and when we made love, I found out that nothing I'd done before had prepared me at all. Well, I suppose it spared me some awkward fumbling, but - it wasn't any fancy technique or superlative number of orgasms or mentalist tricks that made us want to be together every second of the day. It was just _us._ It was that we were in sync with each other, holding nothing back, without pretense or shame or trying to get anything from each other except _more._ We were connected with each other, physically and emotionally, and we could feel that in every touch. It was addictive, and it was something I knew I couldn't replicate with anyone else. That's a lot of the reason I haven't been with many women since she died. I knew it would just be a hollow imitation of what I wanted. I could find a woman who looked like my wife and re-enact a night I spent with her touch by touch, and it would be nothing like what I did with her."

"But you think if you and I had sex, it would be like that," Lisbon said.

"Yes. I mean, not _the same_, but equally intense and spectacular."

"Why?"

"Because of how I love you," he said simply. "And because of this," he added, picking up her hand and rubbing his thumb against her skin.

"Because of what?"

He smiled. "Because every time we touch, I don't just feel another body next to mine. I feel _you._"

Her gaze caught on his and they remained frozen in that tableau, her hand warm beneath his fingers. For a moment, nothing else existed, and he could feel a gravity pulling him toward her.

Then she tugged her hand back and scooted away. She was breathing more quickly than before, but the dazed look slid quickly off her face and was replaced by a worried frown. Her eyes darted around, seeking an escape route.

"Have I upset you?" he asked gently, trying to get a read on her.

"Upset, why would I be upset?" she said, voice going high. "Normal people don't get upset when a handsome, charming, brilliant man says he's desperately in love with them, do they?"

"Meh," he said, "who wants to be normal?"

Their eyes caught again and that elastic band of tension stretched between them, then snapped as she jumped up off the couch to get farther away from him.

"I'm not -" she tried, "I'm just - I'm going to take a walk. Alone," she added emphatically, as if he'd been in any doubt, or as if, he supposed, she wanted to be sure he didn't pretend to misunderstand her.

He had no intention of doing so. She clearly needed to sort something out for herself, and his presence would only distract her. It would be much wiser to let her have her space, and talk her around later if her reflections took her in the wrong direction.

"Have a nice walk," he said mildly. "I'll be here fixing us some lunch."

She grabbed her jacket and fled out the door without a response. He watched her disappear into the fog through the windows, then retreated to the kitchen. He wasn't going to sit watching for her return like a dog waiting for its owner. It would do no good to appear too pathetically lovelorn, besides which whatever conversation lay ahead would almost certainly go better if accompanied by sandwiches. Lisbon was always much more willing to go along with his schemes on a full stomach.

He sighed as he got to work. The high of confessing his feelings had vanished, and in its place was the tantalizing burn of uncertainty that came between throwing in your chips and finding out whether or not you truly held the better cards. He reminded himself that he wouldn't be defeated no matter what happened when she came back. Winning a game of poker didn't depend on the outcome of a single hand, but on knowing the players and the odds. And he knew Teresa very well indeed.

Besides, she hadn't said no. There had been a moment or two when she might even have been close to saying yes. And if she wasn't dismissing his advances out of hand, and she was at least a little tempted, those were odds he could work with.

But despite this rational assessment, his nerves wouldn't calm. He didn't want to be strategic and canny. He just wanted to know what she was thinking.


	8. Chapter 8

VIII. The Beginning

Teresa Lisbon didn't know what to think. She'd been walking for twenty minutes, and her mind was still running in frantic circles. _He loves me,_ she would tell herself, trying to believe it, unable to deny it, feeling the words like a tether dragging her back toward him, her feet wanting to turn around and speed up until she was crashing into him and there was no space between them at all. Then excitement tipped over into panic as she asked herself _what then?_ What would happen after that desperate embrace, when reality set in and the most important relationship in her life was turned on its head, and they had to face the repercussions of what they were doing. What if they drove each other crazy in a bad way instead of a good way? What if he got bored of her, or she lost her patience for his antics, or he wasn't really ready to move on, or she couldn't be what he wanted, or the sex just wasn't as amazing as he thought? Someone had to think things through before they ended up ruining both of their lives, and it obviously wasn't going to be him.

As far as he was concerned, the major impediment to their romantic bliss was apparently his own self-image, a contorted and rickety contraption in which his smug superiority in some areas was perilously balanced against his wretched sense of worthlessness in others. Well, she'd have to work on that no matter what happened between them.

But it clearly fell to her to be the practical one, so she had to think, but she couldn't think, because every time she tried to she just kept seeing the look on his face when he'd told her he wanted to be with her, like he was a kid opening the best present ever found under a Christmas tree, and then the stupid urge to rush back to him kicked in and she was right back where she started.

The fog was beginning to burn off. She still couldn't see the ocean, despite the sound of the waves and the distant barking of sea lions, and the salty tang of the air, but the path ahead of her was clearer than it had been. She found a mossy log and sat down on it, hoping that stilling her body would still her mind as well.

She'd imagined being with him, of course - their attraction was obvious. There had always been the vague thought of _maybe someday_ lurking in the background, only to be ruthlessly suppressed whenever it tried to come up for air, because some things weren't hers to wish for. The only real fantasy she'd permitted herself was this: one of them reached some breaking point and crashed into the other. They came together in heat and desperation for a single night of fireworks, leaving only ashes and cold ground in the morning. He'd retreat to his attic, she'd wash her sheets, neither of them would ever mention it again. She'd been pretty sure that she - that they - could have survived that, and having him once might even be worth the inevitable heartache. Over the past few years, she didn't think there'd been any day, no matter how worried or furious she'd been, when she would have turned him down if he propositioned her.

But he was asking for so much more than that. So much more than she knew how to give. And his paltry solution was to take it slow, to date. As if she could _date_ Patrick Jane. Either it would be an awkward pretense, or it would just be the two of them out for a meal like any other day. Besides, no matter the pace or route, he'd already made his intended destination perfectly clear. It was like he wanted to give her training wheels for the first stage of the Tour de France and thought she'd just catch up to him once she got the hang of cycling. It would never work. And where would they be when she couldn't go the distance?

Part of her wished this whole weekend had never happened, that Jane hadn't over the course of forty-eight hours methodically torn down the barriers between them that they'd jointly spent the previous decade building and rebuilding. What had been so wrong with the way things were before? Maybe things hadn't been perfect, but what they'd had could have lasted.

Still, she wasn't blind. Things had already been different even before they came here. Their old equilibrium had been balanced on the fulcrum of Red John, and as soon as he was gone, some kind of change became inevitable.

And Jane was, at heart, a child: you couldn't show him a locked door and make him believe he was better off not knowing what was on the other side.

Even so, why did he have to throw it open so suddenly? He'd rolled over her like a hurricane, leaving her shipwrecked, unsure which way to swim to reach the shore. If things had to change between them, why couldn't it have happened so slowly she never had to see it, until saying yes to him was merely a formality?

A voice in her head reminded her that she'd known him for ten years and he was already living with her, so how much more gradual could things actually get?

She thought back over the past weeks, over the movie nights and dinners out and little gifts he'd hidden in her drawers, the way he touched her more than he used to, and realized perhaps things had already shifted more than she'd noticed. If he'd just gone on like that another few months, she probably would have found herself kissing him one day without ever knowing what had happened.

That would have been fine with her. But she supposed it wouldn't have been fine with Jane. He hadn't wanted her to sleepwalk into a relationship with him. So he'd carved this time out, away from their daily routines, and woken her up. And even if she was terrified of where the syllogism of his confessions had left them, she couldn't honestly point to any single thing he'd told her and say she wished she didn't know it. She was greedy for every piece of him he'd served up to her, and she knew that made her complicit in this mess as well.

And now he'd placed their fate in her hands. Or at least claimed to. She had no doubt that even if she said no to him, he would continue pursuing her. She knew exactly how persistent and underhanded he could be when he committed to an undertaking.

It would require a great deal of time and effort to truly convince him she didn't want to be with him. And if she finally did, what would happen then? When she'd broken the heart he'd held out to her on a silver platter? That could be the ruin of everything as easily as if they tried to be together and failed. What would he do then? Would he walk away from her entirely so he could get over her? Or would he follow her around for another decade with a sad look on his face, pining as she - what - found a serious boyfriend eventually married someone else? She didn't know what that would do to him. He was finally recovering from one emotional catastrophe - piling a fresh one on top of it might be too much for him to bear.

So where did that leave her? With no safe options. They were probably doomed whether she said yes or no. There was always the third choice of not giving him an answer at all, but that would only buy so much time, and Jane would be filling it with attempts at seduction.

It felt like a trap. She knew Jane hadn't meant it that way - he seemed bizarrely optimistic about the whole situation - but neither of them was anywhere close to good relationship material. And given how little he he was able to ever let go of anything, when things went wrong between them he'd just keep trying and trying instead of admitting it had been a mistake and calling it quits.

She sighed. Thinking wasn't getting her anywhere except cold and confused. And she really wanted another cup of coffee.

Lisbon got up from her log and headed slowly back to the house. By the time she'd arrived, she was thoroughly discouraged.

"I'm still thinking," she snapped at Jane when he stuck his head out of the kitchen at the sound of the front door.

He raised his eyebrows and retreated silently from her, which did her no good as he'd gone back into the kitchen, which was also where the coffee was. He kept out of her way while she assembled her beverage. Her eyes alighted on the platter of sandwiches he'd put together in her absence - he'd made enough that he must have thought she might be bringing Rigsby back with her - and she snatched one up.

He waited until she was halfway through it to open his mouth. "So what have you been thinking about exactly?" he asked, his demeanor carefully neutral.

She scowled at him anyway. "How this is going to end in disaster no matter what I choose," she admitted. "I don't want us to be miserable, and I can't see any way around it."

"Have you considered," he ventured, "that in this instance it might be more helpful to think about what you _do_ want than what you _don't_ want?"

She frowned at him and swallowed her bite of sandwich. "What does what I want have to do with anything?"

"Everything, I would think?"

He could be such an infant. She couldn't help but roll her eyes. "No one gets what they want, Jane. I've found it's much more useful to think about what I'll be able to live with and aim for that instead."

He looked at her like he wanted to cry. "All right," he said with terrible gentleness, "let's look at it your way. What are the outcomes you can't live with?"

She shrugged, ate another bite of sandwich, looked at the floor, her eyes hot all of a sudden. "I don't want to lose you," she confessed.

"Well, darling," he said, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear with a tenderness that ought to be illegal, "I'm afraid even in a best-case scenario, one of us is going to die eventually. So if you grant that we're working with an expiration date, let's say in forty years or so, don't you think we should make the most of the time available to us?"

She glanced at him quickly. It seemed like he was holding himself back from touching her again, and he still had that impossibly sad look on his face. She took a drink of coffee, and then another.

"What if I could promise you wouldn't lose me?" he asked.

"No one can promise that," she told him.

"Actually, couples promise each other that all the time," he pointed out. "Typically in some kind of ceremony, with a person in a robe presiding."

"Yeah, and they don't mean it," she said. "Or they do and they change their minds, or they do until they meet someone else, or until someone kills one of them, or what have you."

"I mean it," he said. "And you know how stubborn I am."

"You mean it _now,_" she clarified.

"I know how to keep a promise," he said quietly. "And I know that once I love someone, I don't stop."

The room was too small for the both of them. The whole house was. She couldn't stay there and have him keep saying such things. "I want to go home," she said.

"Finish your sandwich," he told her. "I'll go pack."

* * *

In the car, with the windows cracked open and the radio on, Lisbon felt better even though they were technically in a smaller space than they had been before.

"What?" she asked after the fourth time he'd glanced tentatively over at her.

"Just - there is one thing you need to decide today," he said, eyes fixed on the road ahead. "And that's whether you want me to check into a hotel tonight." The corners of his mouth lifted. "I am yours to dispose of as you will."

"Right," she said, rolling the idea around in her head. Despite the careful irony of his tone, she knew he'd said it that way for a reason. _He's mine. _It had a dangerously heady feel. She saw his strategy at work - he clearly thought he was more likely to get what he wanted from her if he gave her control of the situation and threw himself upon her mercy than if he tried to claim or exert any shred of control over her - but there was a wistfulness about the way he did it that spoke to a deeper motive. After all, she thought, what does any lost boy want more than to belong to someone again? Not that he was just any Lost Boy - surely Peter himself if anyone could be, from his cockiness to his golden curls to the way the world bent itself around his imagination as if to compensate for the family he had lost. That cast her as Wendy, of course, the little girl dutifully playing house in a world with no parents, looking after a pack of motherless strays. Keeping her little brothers safe. As analogies went, there were certainly worse ones for their relationship. Wendy hadn't tamed Peter or gotten to keep him, but she had perhaps made him more whole.

And Jane - well, he clearly wanted to follow her home and be part of the human world again. She just had to decide if she was going to leave her window open for him.

She sighed. She never could stand to shut him out when he needed her. It wasn't really fair. But then, life never was. And as stacked decks went, she'd been on the losing end of worse before.

She was used to him being her responsibility. It was, she found, comforting to think of it that way. She didn't know what to do with a passionate, romantic Jane, but she was well equipped to handle one who needed her to take care of him. At least now he was actually cooperating instead of running hellbent toward his own destruction.

They'd left the fog along with the coast, and it was a bright day as they drove through the extended sprawl east of San Francisco. There was enough traffic on the freeway to keep Jane at a reasonable speed, and Lisbon felt herself relax.

Well, he'd said that if she was willing to take him on, it could be on her terms, so she supposed she had better figure out what those were.

She didn't want him in a hotel, she decided. She'd never liked the temporariness of his life, the way he kept himself in spaces that had no claim on him, that he could walk out of on a moment's notice whenever he got some damn fool notion in his head. Her apartment was like that too, really - it was hers, not theirs. That wasn't going to do anymore. Maybe she really should add him to the lease. Or they could talk about getting a bigger place together.

In the mean time, he could move his clothes into her closet instead of hiding them in the spare room. She could take the origami creatures he'd made her out of their drawer and line them up on a shelf or a windowsill, in plain sight. So there would be a visible reminder of his presence.

And it was true that he needed a passion project, something to devote himself to beyond the routine demands of their job. Otherwise he'd be bored and difficult. Apparently he'd chosen her. Well, it wasn't what she would have suggested - perhaps something that touched on his love of children and ability to bring joy and magic into their lives? - but at least it didn't involve him killing anyone.

So if she could provide him with a sense of purpose that was constructive and safe, surely that was the right thing to do? Of course, it would require some pretty major adjustments, but if he wanted to devote his prodigious creativity to improving their sex life rather than breaking more people out of maximum security prison, wasn't it her civic duty to let him?

What was he asking of her, really? They already spent all their time together. There was the physical aspect, of course, but that didn't concern her. Their chemistry wasn't a problem, and rough as Jane had been with her heart in the past, he'd always been extremely careful of her body. He was a man who (with one significant but now deceased exception) abhorred violence - his gentleness had been one of the first things that endeared him to her.

She'd be giving up the chance to be with anyone else, but it wasn't as if suitors were lining up at her door, and she didn't have a busy social life where she was likely to meet someone else. Frankly, Jane was a full time job all on his own, sex or no, and if she had managed to get herself into a real relationship in the past few years she didn't know how she would have juggled it all. Not that she'd tried hard. She had a difficult time with new people. She didn't like letting them in, so anyone brash enough to force his way past her barriers was too much of an ass to keep seeing, and anyone who didn't bother pushing never really got to know her at all.

Jane already knew her, though. There'd been no way to stop it. She had tried, but he just kept being there. For years and years. Needling her and just plain needing her, needing those occasional small moments of kindness and connection that had somehow amounted to a bond stronger than she'd ever intended.

So logically, he wasn't a bad option. She trusted him as much as she trusted anyone, and she was used to him, and he was very nice to look at. She could feel the way her body was drawn to him every moment now. She'd noticed it intermittently for years and not let herself worry about what it meant, but over the past few days it had gotten stronger and more constant, and by now she had to actually stop herself from reaching out to him, from placing her hand over his on the gear shift or burying her fingers in his curls. Resisting that pull had become instinct, and the thought of giving in to it instead was frighteningly exhilarating.

Of course the changes wouldn't just be in the physical realm. He'd been very clear about wanting to make her happy. To take care of her. She could understand that, she'd been taking care of him for a long time and had no intention of stopping. But having it go the other way was unsettling. She was used to operating without a safety net, and if she allowed him to set one up under her, and she grew accustomed to it, what would happen if it wasn't there anymore one day? He'd offered to never leave - and in a self-declared Zone of Truth, even - but he'd broken promises to her before.

And then there was the big question, the worst question, the one she could barely force herself to ask. Jane didn't just need someone to look after and take to bed, he needed someone to love him. And she didn't know if she could give him that. She felt something for him, something so powerful it sometimes overwhelmed her. But it was too big, too complicated, made up of too many smaller, often contradictory feelings to name. She felt like the blind men in the parable trying to identify an elephant by touch (a rope? a pillar? a snake?) - the pieces of it seemed to make sense, but they didn't assemble into anything she understood. She didn't know if it was enough.

Guiltily, she returned to what she could wrap her mind around: the things she would have to do. She might as well face the hard part. She would have to open up to him the way he had to her this weekend. To tell him about her past and her regrets and her innermost feelings. She understood what intimacy entailed, even if she'd never actually practiced it with anyone. The prospect of stripping off her armor for him terrified her - he saw so much of her already. If she gave up those last, most vulnerable pieces, the amount of damage he could do to her would have no bounds at all. The keenness of his mind could hone her confessions into razor blades and deploy them with surgical accuracy.

But what was the alternative? To be alone forever, or to be alone-ish, permitting Jane to orbit her but only from a safe distance? Or to be vulnerable to someone else instead? Someone who wouldn't know her the way Jane did, who didn't know what they'd been through together and why she'd done the things she had to help him? Who else would be able to understand all that even if she ever could bring herself to talk about it?

She allowed her traitorous eyes to wander back to his face. He had a mild version of his "ah what a lovely day it is!" expression on, but underneath that she could see an unfamiliar nervousness about him.

"Was it hard?" she asked him.

He shot her a quick, unreadable glance. "Was what hard?"

"Being honest with me all weekend," she said.

"Not lying wasn't hard," he told her.

"Really?"

"What did I have to lie about these past few days?"

"Hmm."

Another glance. "Some of it was hard," he admitted. "Telling you all that. Mostly getting started each time. I thought I might throw up, or dissolve into a puddle of sweat. Once I got going it was easy to keep talking, though. It felt good."

"It did?"

He smiled. "You're a good audience."

She balked a bit, knowing that for a conman, a good audience was a gullible one, easy to manipulate. But he hadn't meant it like that. He hadn't been conning her. She knew that.

"I think that'll be the worst part of this whole being more open with you plan," he continued.

"What will?"

"Not having you as my audience so much. If you're in on the gag with me, you aren't exactly going to be surprised and impressed by the big reveal. Surprising you was always my favorite part."

"I have no doubt you will continue to find ways to surprise me," she grumbled. "And anyway, I always hated that part. Even when I was impressed."

"Really?"

"Of course I did," she snapped. "I wasn't supposed to be your audience, I was supposed to be your partner. Being on the outside of your shenanigans was always a reminder of just how little you thought of me that way."

"I did though," he said. "I thought you could be both. But I can see how that wasn't fair." Then he brightened. "Actually a number of the apologies I still owe you relate to that type of situation. Would you like to hear a few of them?"

"No!" she snapped.

"Okay," he said easily.

Her mind wouldn't settle back down. She resented his serenity, the way none of this seemed to rattle him. She still felt like an earthquake survivor staggering through the aftershocks. Even if he was immune to the turmoil himself, he ought to at least be able recognize what he was putting her through.

"The last time I really felt loved by anyone was before my mom died," she said.

He shot her a questioning look before returning his attention to the road. "I got the impression that Greg loved you."

She frowned at the mention of her ex-fiancé. "I've always had two MOs with men. The first is just casual fun - no muss, no fuss. The second is the romantic thing. I like him, he likes me, maybe things even start to get serious. But I'm just pretending to be who he wants me to be, to be this nice woman with her life together who likes - whatever he likes, really. And things go great until one day I can't keep pretending anymore, and I bail. That was Greg. He loved some version of me. You think I let him see what I was really like back then? How angry I was all the time? How trapped I felt? He was my escape from all that. Until it got too real and he was just another thing I had to get away from."

"I don't want you to be anything but yourself, Teresa," he said. "You never have to pretend for me."

She couldn't look at him. "I don't know how to do anything else."

"That's all right," he told her, unperturbed. "You'll figure it out. There's nothing you can do that will make me stop loving you, so I'll just keep being here, and you'll get used to it after a while."

Lisbon slouched down in her seat and stared out the window, trying not to cry. Outside the window, suburban sprawl had given away to wind turbine-topped hills, and those had given way to the agricultural vistas of the San Joaquin Valley.

She didn't know why this was so hard for her. Surely when normal people received a declaration of love they understood their own feelings and could say yes or no, be happy or let him down gently. But she just felt like a bomb had gone off next to her and she couldn't yet tell whether it had destroyed her home or broken her out of prison. She surreptitiously wiped her eyes with the hem of her sleeve.

"You know, I think you're wrong," Jane told her a while later.

"What?" she said, startled.

"I think you're much better at this than you think you are," he explained. "If you were just going to go along with me and pretend to be what you thought I wanted, you would have said yes already," he pointed out. "You would have pretended to be thrilled about what I told you. But you didn't. In fact, everything you've said to me today has been honest and genuine, and none of it has been so I'll have some false image of you. I think these other guys you've been with have just been the wrong ones. You're an intuitive person, I'm sure you could tell that they didn't want the real you - that they couldn't handle it even. And perhaps you were protecting yourself by picking that type of man - the type that would be satisfied with you reflecting what he wanted back at him and not care to look beneath the surface. But I don't think that's any indication at all of how you would be with someone who truly knew and loved you."

She turned this idea over. "But maybe I'm just being honest with you because we're not a couple yet."

He laughed at this. "So really, you think that the second you call me your boyfriend some switch is going to flip in your head, and patterns of interaction we've become habituated to over literally a decade will just vanish, and you'll drop down some facade of fake emotional stability and accommodating femininity?"

"Maybe," she said defensively.

"And even if you did, exactly how long do you think that would last around me?"

She thought of the woman she'd been in relationships before, the smile plastered on her face, the playful but measured flirting, the way she'd ask questions to keep a man talking about himself and avoid having to fill in too many details about herself. She imagined doing that sitting across a restaurant table from Jane. It didn't really work. He'd just ask what was wrong with her. She couldn't decide whether that was comforting or not.

"Fine," she said. "But that doesn't mean I wouldn't screw it up some other way."

"I'll take my chances," he said gleefully.

She glanced at him, then did a double take at the grin on his face. "Why do you look so happy?" she demanded.

"Because you said yes!"

"I did not!" she retorted, rehearsing their conversation in her head to see if she'd accidentally blurted out the wrong thing.

"Well, you said you were going to say yes," he conceded.

"I didn't say that either!"

"You said we weren't a couple yet," he announced triumphantly. "'Yet' is what you say about something that will happen in the future - hence, going to say yes."

"I was just speaking hypothetically! It just meant, if we do become a couple. There was no yes."

"So you deny that you're going to say yes?"

"I didn't say anything!"

"You didn't answer the question. Are you going to say yes?"

She crossed her arms. "I might and I might not."

"Well, are you going to say no?"

She opened her mouth and closed it again, the words _I might_ lodged in her throat, unwilling to come out.

"I knew it! I knew it! If you aren't going to say no, then you're going to say yes, aren't you?"

"I hate you," she said.

"No, you want to be with me," he said. "And I want to be with you! Let's celebrate. Can I kiss you?"

"No!"

"Why not?"

"Because I haven't said yes, and because you're driving, and because I hate you."

At that point, Jane initiated a wild maneuver that involved sudden acceleration and then an abrupt turn and sudden braking. When Lisbon recovered her breath, they were in the parking lot of a gas station at the end of an offramp in what claimed to be Vacaville, California.

"We're not driving anymore," he pointed out helpfully. "And I'm madly in love with you, and you don't actually hate me, so can we kiss now? Please?"

She looked at him then, and he was gazing back at her with such radiant adoration that she doubted anyone on earth would have had the fortitude to deny him.

She managed a disgruntled scowl. "You're an absurd, impossible lunatic," she told him.

"But I'm _your_ absurd impossible lunatic, aren't I?"

"Yes," she admitted, and kissed him.

It was a brief, declaratory kiss - a firm handshake to seal a deal in kiss form really - and even so, the physical reality of it, the slightly chapped texture of his lips, the roughness of his stubble, the cedar-and-bergamot smell of him, was staggeringly intense.

She pulled back, heart fluttering like pigeon's wings in her chest, but he caught her face in those soft hands of his.

She glanced up at him from beneath half-closed lids and saw him beatific in the dusty afternoon sunlight angling through the windshield, his own eyes dark and drowsy.

"Again," he whispered, pulling her back toward him.

Their second kiss was slow and languorous. Lisbon felt drugged and dazed as he tangled his fingers in her hair and explored her mouth, unable to do anything but respond to his lazy seduction. Their tongues met and she lost track of what was her and what was him.

For the first time ever, she was glad the preposterous deathtrap he called a car lacked shoulder belts, because there was nothing holding them back as they leaned into each other.

When they parted, she blinked and sank back into her seat, then looked over at him. His eyes were still closed and the smile on his face was so small it was barely there, but he was incandescent with joy. She'd never seen him like that before, and it amazed her that she could give him so much happiness with just a kiss.

She wondered what else she could do to him if she tried.

Then he opened his eyes, and as soon as he was looking back at her, her cheeks flushed and she found herself awkward, unsure of everything.

She'd just kissed Jane. Her pain-in-the-ass consultant. Jane, the untouchable, eternally grieving husband. Her _friend._ Her… _boyfriend?_ Was that what he was now?

A disbelieving laugh bubbled out of her.

"Are you freaking out now?" Jane asked her. He didn't sound concerned; his voice was like melted chocolate.

"A little?"

"That's all right," he told her. "Everything's fine." His smile spread across his whole face. "It was a good kiss, wasn't it?"

She nodded, unable to find her voice.

"That was just the start, darling," he said. "We're going to be fantastic at this."

She took a deep breath. "I've made my decision," she told him.

"And what have you chosen?" he asked.

"No hotels for you," she said. "Let's go home."

* * *

**Author's Note:** One more chapter to go! Thank you all for coming along on this ride with me so far, your reviews etc. have been a lovely welcome to the fandom. Hopefully I'll get the end posted in a couple of days!


	9. Chapter 9

IX. The Fine Print

She caught Patrick's wrist as he went to unlock her front door. He glanced over at Teresa and froze when he saw her face. She was nervous and determined, like she was about to do something unpleasant yet necessary. Was she having second thoughts already? She'd been quiet on the last leg of their drive, sneaking little glances at him with a Mona Lisa smile, but he'd seen no evidence until now that she might regret giving in to him.

She used her grip to lift his hand up and said, "You should get a copy of this key made tomorrow." She gave his wrist a little shake, making the single key jingle on its SFPD keychain.

"I should?" he said, thrown by the turn her mind had taken.

She pulled him around so he was facing her rather than the door. "That's the guest key," she said, which he knew because she'd told him so when she handed it to him a week after he'd started following her home every night. "You're not a guest anymore," she continued, "so you need your own key. So we can use that one for actual guests."

"I'm not a guest?" he asked. He felt it ought to be obvious whether she was asking him to move in or revoking his standing invitation (though apparently in such a way that he'd be coming over often enough to need his own key), but somehow it wasn't.

"You live here," she told him, and let go of his wrist.

"I do?" he asked, wanting to be sure before he allowed himself to believe it.

Her expression closed like a steel gate. "Unless you don't want to," she said. Suddenly she was digging out her own keys and bustling about, unloading the car with stunning rapidity.

He found himself trailing in her wake throughout the process, somehow always coming when she was going. He finally cornered her in the kitchen a few minutes later, but as soon as she caught sight of him, she maneuvered around him so he was the one backed against a counter. "Did you not mean it?" she demanded.

"Mean what?"

"That I could add you to my lease tomorrow," she said. "Didn't expect me to call your bluff, did you?"

"No," he said honestly, then cursed himself as pain flashed across her face. "It wasn't a bluff," he explained hurriedly, "I just meant, no I didn't think you'd take me up on it."

"Really," she said. She was wearing an expression she typically directed at suspects in an interrogation room, but her arms were crossed defensively, to protect herself from him. "I know you didn't _mean_ to lie to me," she continued, playing Good Cop, "but maybe you were just carried away and got a little ahead of yourself."

He shook his head. "That's not it," he said, "I do want to live with you, I just - I really thought you'd probably want me to step back a bit while things are changing between us."

"Ah, right," she said smoothly. "All that space you keep talking about giving me. But maybe that's just a convenient way to give it to yourself. After all, between the two of us, I'm not the one with the habit of running away."

"That's not what's happening here," he assured her, desperate to regain control of the narrative. "You just surprised me. That's all. Look - you have to admit that this morning, you weren't exactly jumping for joy at the thought of being with me. And while I'm truly delighted that you came around so quickly, can you really blame me for being caught just a bit off guard by what you said at the door?"

She scrutinized him, clearly trying to read him, and though he tried to keep his face open, he knew she wouldn't be able to tell that the anxiety he was displaying was over their misunderstanding and not the prospect of permanent cohabitation. "You never told me your code phrase," he said as inspiration struck. "For when you need me to be honest. What do you want it to be?"

She looked oddly vulnerable as she said, "As God is my witness."

A smile broke across his face as he remembered watching _Gone with the Wind_ with her seven weeks ago. It had been a late night after a case wrapped up, neither of them able to sleep, and the film had been on TV. They'd been punch-drunk with exhaustion by the time Scarlett swore never to be hungry again, and it had set off a ridiculous conversation about calling God to the stand in a criminal trial. Jane had offered what he'd felt were some very incisive approaches to cross-examining the deity, while she suggested creative ways that miracles could be used to tamper with evidence. It had been one of the first times after McAllister's death that he'd felt fully like himself again.

"Sure, that works," he said. "Now use it."

She took a breath. "As God is my witness, I need you to tell me how you really feel about moving in with me right now."

He schooled his face into sober contemplation. For the conceit to work, she had to believe he took it seriously. Which he did - it was just that answering this particular question required no thought at all beyond how to persuade her of his sincerity. "It's something I very much want," he said to her, reaching out to peel one of her hands away from her side so he could hold it. "For my own part, I have no hesitation - I just don't want you to rush into anything you'll regret once you stop and think it through. I want to share my life with you. I want to spend every day with you. But I know this is a big step, and I would much rather take things slowly and miss a few mornings with you right now than go too fast and risk our whole future. After I realized I was in love with you, it took me weeks to figure out what to do about it. I just sprang it on you this morning, so I think it would be only reasonable for you to need longer than this to decide what feels right to you."

"You didn't seem concerned about rushing me in Vacaville," she pointed out grumpily.

He shrugged, allowing himself a rakish smile. "I couldn't help myself."

She rolled her eyes. "Well, I've spent most of the day thinking, and I'm sorry if it didn't take long enough for you, but I'm not confused. I can't say no to you, and you said that if I agreed to this insanity, I got to make the terms. So I'm doing it. I frankly see no benefit whatsoever in trying to build a relationship by spending less time together. I don't want you in some hotel, I don't want to have to schedule dates to see you after work, and I don't want to pretend this is breezy and casual. You've already been living here, Jane, it's not some dramatic change. I just want you to do it openly instead of pretending you're a temporary guest who just happens to keep his entire wardrobe in my guest closet."

"What do you mean you can't say no to me?" he asked, worried all over again about what might be going on in that head of hers.

She pulled her hand back and blew out a long breath. "I mean - I thought about saying no. I thought it might be the right decision. But I couldn't imagine actually going through with it. So… if it couldn't be that, it had to be the other thing, right?"

Jane felt himself at a sudden loss. He didn't know how to read her in this situation. "Now I feel like I've tricked you into this after all, without even intending to," he admitted. "I want to be with you, but not if you're only doing it for my sake. Not if it isn't what you want too."

Now it was her turn to peer at him in confusion. "I'm not saying I don't want it. I… I want to do what's right for _us. _I just have a hard time knowing what that is. But I don't think it's going backwards, or pushing you away from me. So I just… I'll tell you when there's something I want you to do, and you can ask me when there's something you want. That's it. That's the best plan I have."

"And you want me to officially move in?"

"Yes."

He grabbed her and kissed her forehead. "Consider it done," he said. "Though I'm afraid I'll have to insist on paying half the rent from now on. Otherwise it just wouldn't feel right."

"I guess I can live with that," she said wryly.

All at once the tension vacated the room. Jane sagged against the counter in relief. Everything was still all right. Everything was better than all right. The two of them stared at each other for a moment, neither sure what was supposed to happen next.

Jane collected himself first and put on an easy grin. "Darling," he said, "we're moving in together at long last! This calls for a toast. Champagne?"

"I don't have any-" Lisbon began, as he pulled the bottle of champagne out of the fridge.

Her eyes narrowed. "You had that tucked away before we even left on Friday! What happened to giving me space? What happened to 'take as long as you want to decide'? You planned this all along!"

He shrugged. "I didn't plan, I _hoped. _In the worst case, I'd have given you a nice bottle to enjoy on your own one day. I like giving you nice things." While he was talking, he retrieved the champagne flutes he'd hidden on the top shelf of her glassware cabinet.

When he popped the cork, it ricocheted off the ceiling and into the sink. He poured the foaming liquid into glasses, handing her the first one.

"To us?" she suggested.

"To my favorite person in all the world, peerless queen of all she surveys," he corrected her, glowingly happy, "and the miserable human wreckage with whom she has foolishly yet permanently saddled herself!"

He clinked his glass against hers and drank deeply.

x-x-x

Several hours later, they lay tangled together on the couch. After the champagne was gone they'd agreed they were hungry, and Jane had called a restaurant that Lisbon didn't think delivered, but forty minutes later the doorbell rang, resulting in steaks, mashed potatoes, and a bottle of red wine so delicious she was glad she didn't know what it had cost. Now the wine was gone as well, and Jane was stretched out on his back, Lisbon wedged on her side between him and the back of the couch, her head on his chest, his arm around her shoulders, her leg laced between his, as he cold read the contestants on _The Bachelor_.

When sober, Jane tended to rattle off the childhood traumas of strangers on the street. Drunk Jane, it turned out, liked analyzing the sexual peccadilloes of marriage-hungry starlets. Lisbon smacked his chest, trying to stop laughing. "She does not!" she protested.

"That is the face," he insisted, "of a young woman sexually fixated on her middle school English teacher. Did you see what that Shakespeare quotation did to her? I will bet you anything she's touched herself while watching _Dead Poets Society._"

She gave him another poke, trying to stop laughing, and then became distracted by the feel of his chest.

"Teresa," he said in scandalized tones, "are you _groping_ me?"

"Hmm, I suppose I am," she said, surprised to find he was right but by no means prepared to stop, as his ribcage stuttered with laughter under her hand.

Getting drunk had been a really excellent idea. Possibly it was Jane's best idea ever, and she didn't even know if he'd arranged it on purpose or if he'd just gotten carried away by his own exuberance.

After their kiss in the car, it had been like she had double vision: every time she caught a glimpse of him, he was two things at once, both the friend and colleague she knew down to her bones and the amorous stranger he'd just conjured into being. She didn't know what to call him, or how to talk to him, much less how she was - supposed to? allowed to? - touch him.

But then came the dry champagne, and the velvety Bordeaux, and now everything was clear and wonderful. Jane was still the same Jane as always, except now she could lie on top of him and let her hands wander, which he seemed to enjoy almost as much as she did. At this rate she might turn into as big a fan of couches as he was. Seems she'd just never had the right body pillow before.

This felt like an insight that ought to be shared. "You have hidden depths, Jane," she told him. "Turns out you're remarkably comfortable."

His chest rumbled beneath her cheek. "I'll add that to my resume."

That earned him another poke. "I don't think it's a talent that needs to be shared with the world."

"Ooh, so now you want to keep me all to yourself?"

"Maybe I'll add that to my list of terms," she said.

"Fair enough," he agreed, and pressed a kiss to her forehead. "I wouldn't exactly be thrilled if you took up cuddling with Cho."

She made a face. "Who wants to cuddle Cho? It'd be like snuggling up against a brick wall. Now, if we're talking about Ben from Counterterrorism..."

He rolled over so they were nose to nose and narrowed his eyes at her. "No Ben from Counterterrorism for you!"

She tilted her head and frowned in confusion. "Why not? My terms don't say anything about _me _limiting myself. Ben has a very nice… well, everything, really." She laughed at his glower of disapproval. "Come on, did you really expect to be exclusive after being together for all of six hours? You've been upgraded to roommate with makeout privileges, don't get too far ahead of yourself."

He stared at her with glassy-eyed shock for half a second before attacking her with tickles. She shrieked with triumph and laughter. "I - had - you," she taunted him breathlessly, squirming away from the fingers unerringly targeting the sensitive spots on her sides.

"You had nothing," he countered.

She hooked a leg around him and flipped them over, pinning his arms above his head. They were pressed together from thigh to chest, and her mouth went dry. He stared up at her with something approaching reverence, and her mind was empty of all thoughts but one as she slowly lowered her mouth to his. _Mine._

x-x-x

"I like makeout privileges," he told her sometime later, idly running his fingers through her hair, blanketed in a warm sense of peace that he hadn't experienced in so long he'd forgotten it was possible. "Do I have any other new perks I should be aware of?"

"Mm," she said indistinctly. "Closet privileges."

"What're those?"

"Your clothes can move in with my clothes," she explained. "They can come out of hiding."

He chuckled. "They'll be pleased to hear it," he told her. "Anything else?"

She shrugged bonelessly from where she was nestled against his chest. "I'll keep you posted."

If someone had told him a month ago that he would spend his first evening as Teresa's boyfriend drunk on the couch watching reality TV, he would have been profoundly disappointed in his failure to properly romance her. But now that it had come to pass, he wouldn't change it for anything. He'd seen her tipsy before, but she'd never been this playful, tactile creature whom he found entirely enchanting. And there was no tension about how far to take things physically - they both understood their first time together shouldn't be under the influence, so there was no need for awkward uncertainty. Besides, after the heavy emotional turbulence of the past few days, they both needed a chance to relax and unwind as they got used to being _them_ in this delightful new manner.

He glanced over at the television, where a couple with more money than taste was debating which house to buy, and then down at Teresa to tell her how soon they were going to get divorced, only to find that her eyes were closed and she was at least half asleep.

He knew he should get her into bed soon, but he couldn't bring himself to move quite yet. The feel of her against him was too sweet. In the morning they'd be back at the office, her at her desk and him on his couch, and he'd be barred from all but the most innocuous of touches for eight hours straight. He could be a little greedy now, and collect a few more memories to tide him over until they were back home again.

Home. The wine must be getting to him, because the thought that this apartment was his _home_ now was making his chest ache. This was the same couch he'd been lounging on for months, but now it was _their_ couch. In _their_ living room. It was a mediocre piece of furniture in a perfectly ordinary apartment, and he was staggeringly grateful for it.

He shouldn't be surprised that Teresa had given him so much more than he'd expected - her generosity had overwhelmed him often enough in the past - but he really hadn't thought his plan would work so well. He'd thought she'd need time to process her feelings and wait for proof that he really was going to change how he treated her. He'd emotionally prepared himself for weeks or months of testing and hesitation.

He had not prepared himself for this. Perhaps he couldn't have. Perhaps all you could do with a feeling like this was surrender to it. It had been so long since he'd felt at home. Since he'd had someone to hold, to touch, to bare his heart to. The intimacy of it was almost too much to stand and neither of them had removed a single piece of clothing. He felt like a starving man seated at a banquet table, his stomach too shrunken to eat his fill of the abundance laid before him. There would be time, he told himself, to savor each taste in the days and months ahead. Over time, the rough edge of desperation would be sanded off of his contentment, and he'd let go of the fear that nothing this good could be his to keep.

Of course he understood that not everything was settled yet. Teresa was still acclimating to him in this new role - though the alcohol had at least temporarily smoothed the transition - and there were likely to be hiccups in their adjustment to each other. Her little jab about being exclusive (he blamed the wine for having been even briefly taken in by her act) spoke to that - jokes often hid a kernel of truth, and she must have some misgivings about what kinds of freedom she might be giving up for him.

But he would show her it was all worth it. What he felt then, holding her against him - that was worth anything. Against all odds, it was now his to lose. And he had no intention of letting it go.

So he'd better begin as he meant to go on: by taking proper care of her.

"You need to wake up a little, darling," he murmured to her, trailing soft kisses along her hairline. "It's time to go to bed."

x-x-x

Teresa sighed as Jane's words pulled her back to full wakefulness. She knew he was right, but she didn't want to move. She couldn't remember the last time anything had felt as nice as this. She was so relaxed she felt like she'd melted. Everything about Jane was pleasing: his warmth, his grip on her: sure but not confining, his scent, the way his breathing kept time with hers. The friction of his fingers on her scalp as he stroked her hair felt like magic and she found herself leaning into his touch like a purring cat.

Her worries had begun to return as her intoxication faded, and her mind felt like it had drifted halfway back to Monterey, still putting together the pieces of everything he'd told her, but her body had no such misgivings. It was exactly where it wanted to be. She was a cop: her body's instincts had saved her life more times than she could count, so she knew enough to respect its wisdom. And it liked being next to Jane's body very much indeed.

That had to be a good sign. She'd never been much of a cuddler before - it always seemed nice in theory, but in practice it got uncomfortable after a few minutes, and she'd find herself looking for an excuse to pull away. At least until now. She must have been on that couch with Jane for hours, and the only reason she could face dragging herself off of it was that she'd get have him in bed with her too.

With that thought to fortify her, she levered herself up and over Jane and staggered to the bathroom to brush her teeth.

When he joined her in bed after their ablutions, she tugged his arm to get him closer. "Welcome to spooning privileges," she said.

Though he wrapped himself snugly around her without hesitation, he murmured, "Are you sure you don't want to leave some room for Ben from Counterterrorism?"

She made a face at him over her shoulder, but had to concede he had the right to a little insecurity after her what she'd pulled on him earlier. "I don't think Ben's wife would like that too much," she told him.

He arched an eyebrow. "How do we know what kind of arrangement they have? Some marriages are more open than others."

She rolled around to face him properly, still cocooned in the circle of his arms. "I don't want a fancy arrangement," she told him plainly. "I was just teasing."

He looked at once pained and relieved. "I would understand if you didn't want to feel… completely tied down to me right away," he said.

"Really? You'd be fine with me going out on a date with someone else tomorrow, watching me kiss him goodnight on our doorstep before I came in and slept next to you?"

"I'd hate every second of it. But if it was what you needed to do to feel sure you were making the right choice, I'd live with it."

She kissed him lightly, trying to chase the misery from his face. She didn't want him to look like that anymore. She wanted him to look the other way, like he had on the couch, and in the car after their kiss. "I don't want anyone else. Truly."

He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked so deeply into her eyes she thought he must see all the way to the bottom of her. "What do you want, Teresa?" he asked, voice low and easy.

And for that one moment, secure in his embrace and the dim glow of the bedside light, it seemed like that might be a question with an answer. "I want _this,_" she said, reaching an arm around him to pull him even closer. "And I want to make you happy."

Suddenly that golden smile was back on his face. "Welcome to getting what you want, darling," he told her, and leaned in for a kiss.

His lips were careful, warm and responsive to every move she made, but when she opened her mouth, his hand tightened on the back of her head and a tremor went through him. His tongue laved hers, testing and teasing, and her body filled again with that hot molten feeling, as if her skin had become permeable, letting some unknown substance pass freely between them.

Slowly, like a camera lens twisting into focus, a word came to her for how he made her feel: _cherished._ He was touching her in a way no one had before: not trying to consume her or take her somewhere or extract something from her, but just sharing himself, feeling her and feeling with her, with utter intensity and focus. She felt like the only thing in his world.

She knew that this was what had been building all weekend, or for the past month, or maybe since the day they met, their mutual bids for attention leapfrogging from case-related quips to cups of tea to a pony to a whole life together. And God, as much as being seen frightened her, she wanted every particle of attention he granted her, and she wanted to look her fill at him and see every thought and emotion and maniacal plan that lit up his exceptional mind and his exquisite face.

And now she could. She understood, finally, that there was no distinction between knowing him and being known, having him and being his. Wanting the one was the same as wanting the other, and she wanted everything.

Even if it meant having nowhere left to hide.

She pulled away from the kiss and smiled up at him, confident that he would read exactly how precious he was to her from her face when she said, "I like it here. I think I'll stay."

* * *

**Author's Note: **This story is now complete. Thanks for sticking with it! I don't have plans for anything else this long in the fandom, but I might at some point write a few bonus scenes from this story's universe, so let me know if you have any specific requests (lingering issues to be unpacked, conflicts to overcome, milestones to reach, etc.).


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